I've learned the process. It's amazing and beautiful, and I'd probably pay someone to get a really good Dag portrait done. But the market I don't think is there to sustain more than a handful of people practicing the medium because as others have already pointed out, A: there is a lot of ignorance of the process, and B: to make money at it you'd have to charge a LOT (we're talking sitting fees of $500+ depending on plate size). Realistically speaking, unless you have assistants to process the plate, you're talking about making no more than four or five plates a day. You'd spend a good hour to two hours each day polishing plates to get ready for sensitization. Then once your plates are polished, you have to fume them with the iodine and bromine to make them light-sensitive. That process takes say 10 minutes per plate (the fuming itself doesn't take that long, but the process of loading the plate, fuming, checking the sensitization, and loading the plate in the camera could easily take that long). Your exposure will be measured in minutes, not seconds. Then development, fixing, and gilding the plate will add another hour. Granted, you can sensitize a batch of plates in the morning and use them later, but it is still best to sensitize, expose and process them immediately. They keep longer than wet plate, but they're not dry plates or film. The sensitized silver layer will begin to oxidize and lose sensitivity and contrast very quickly.
