David Harms
There are a handful of people that practice wet plate in Washington state and David Harms is one of them. We met up one day at my studio in Georgetown and proceeded to geek out!! he brought his handmade ultra large format camera (12 x 20) and he set it up for me. He mentioned that he would be getting some instruction on making Daguerreotypes from a guy in Oregon. He said he would be willing to share information and possibly work together in the future to create some Dags. There is nothing more beautiful than a finely crafted Daguerreotype and someday I WILL have the knowledge to make them.
David was cool about being photographed so I shot a couple of 11 x 14 inch plates. The exposure was 1 second at f/22 and it was shot with the big Hawkeye 14 x 17 RR lens. The bigger plates take a lot of collodion and they are absorb a ton of silver nitrate so I shoot them rarely. I think this called for the bigger plate. There is a chemical fog on this plate from the heat. I suspect the developer but I had a very weak cyanide bath and the batch of collodion may have been a little off. It doesn’t take much to run into trouble and I was happy I got this image that day.