Unidentified girl, three-quarter length portrait, facing front, seated in chair

Daguerreotype Portrait

Portrait of an unidentified woman (daguerreotype)

Unidentified woman

Daguerreotype

Unidentified man

Unidentified man, possibly William Warner Fiske.

James Brown

Unidentified man (Public Domain)

Unidentified man, about 50 years of age, head-and-shoulders portrait, the face nearly in profile to the left.

Daguerreotype Photographs

The daguerreotype was the first publicly announced photographic process.
It was developed by Louis Daguerre together with Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. Niepce had produced the first photographic image in the camera obscura using asphaltum on a copper plate sensitised with lavender oil that required very long exposures.

The image in a Daguerreotype is formed by the amalgam, or alloy, of mercury and silver. Mercury vapor from a pool of heated mercury is used to develop the plate that consists of a copper plate with a thin coating of silver rolled in contact that has previously been sensitised to light with iodine vapour so as to form silver iodide crystals on the silver surface of the plate.

Exposure times were later reduced by using bromine to form silver bromide crystals, and by replacing the Chevalier lenses with much larger, faster lenses designed by Joseph Petzval.

Credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daguerreotype

Daguerreotype

Unidentified man

Unidentified man.

This daguerreotype photo is public domain.

Daguerreotypes from mid-1800's

These images are public domain.

Daguerreotype

Military officer and a woman, the officer in uniform, standing, facing front, the woman seated, on the left, nearly full face.

Daguerreotypes from mid 1800's