Recovery of Degraded-Beyond-Recognition 19th Century Daguerreotypes

Super interesting. My dad had a pretty interesting hobby: recreating all the old photographic processes.

I sat for many of them and worked together with him to prepare, expose and develop many of these.

Super dangerous stuff, think Mercury vapor and Iodine in quantities large enough to raise eyebrows at purchase time. It's a miracle nobody in the family got seriously ill because of all of this, my dad wasn't really aware of how unsafe this all was (and I was 10 or so and definitely wasn't aware of it either, I just thought it was all super cool).

Another one that I really liked was very early color photography using potato starch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autochrome_Lumi%C3%A8re

There are worse ways to pass the time.