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In Heirloom Harvest, Old-School Portraits Of Vegetable Treasures

Stashed in: Art!, Plants!, Camera, Skillz, Art, Botany


A daguerreotype is a photograph image on a sheet of silver-plated copper. The process involves polishing that sliver surface to a mirror finish and then sensitizing it with iodine and bromine to make it light-sensitive. Then that metal plate is put into a view camera — a type of camera that you see in pictures that has an accordion bellows. It's a large-format camera. You make your exposure and then the image is processed and the remaining sensitive silver salts are removed. What's left on the sheet of silver is a deposit of silver crystals, and those silver crystals are the image. To view the image, you have to put something dark in front of the mirror. So it's a rather delicate operation to even view the image but that's one of the charms of it, I think.

Vertus Savoy Cabbage

Daguerreotype seems to capture every nook and cranny.

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