Daguerreotype: Quarter-plate - Portrait of Laura

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Quarter-plate daguerreotype portrait of my wife Laura.
Interesting and worth noting with this plate is a faint halation, almost like a Sabatier-effect, at the light-dark junctions (where highlight and shadow meet adjacently). I initially likened this to something like the halation that can occur with film development when stand and semi-stand development are used but the mechanism is not the same. Halation in film development is caused by the diffusion of active paper developer away from less exposed areas and into more exposed areas where developer has exhausted. In this case, the phenomena is explained on page 316 of "The Techniques and Material Aesthetics of the Daguerreotype" by Mike Robinson. In an email, he offered the following clarity: "Essentially, it's caused by the ratio between mercury vapour and the demand for it at the latent image site. Since mercury vapour is uniform at the plate's surface during development, there is greater demand for it at the high latent image sites and the article growth is restricted by the available mercury. In the shadows there is much more available mercury proportionally fro the few latent image sites so development produces much larger image particles in the shadows. At the intersection between dark and light, there's more development along the edges."
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