The Cyanotype Process

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a darkroom workshop where I was taught an alternative printing process called Cyanotype.

Also known as sunprints, Cyanotypes are the original blueprints and were used in the first photographically illustrated book, Photographs of British Algae by Anna Atkins. The process uses light sensitive iron salts and ultra violet light (hence sunprints) and so it is a relatively cheap way of making photographic prints. The emulsion can be applied to almost any slightly porous surface that can be soaked in water.  

Now, I can't remember the names of the chemicals we used (perhaps I should have taken notes) but you make the emulsion in two parts and it only becomes light sensitive when you mix them together. After painting the mixture onto water colour paper we left it to dry for about 20 minutes. Instead of using the sunlight to make our exposure which probably would have take a few hours, we popped over to the textiles workshop and borrowed their uv exposure unit thingy that they use for screen printing which meant we only had to expose the paper for a few minutes.

This image I made using a digital photograph I took at the Hereford May fair earlier this year which I turned to a negative on the computer and printed on acetate. I'm really pleased with how well it turned out and how much detail was retained. The photogram below hasn't worked as well. The leaves I've used were quite thick so not much of the detail has come through but it would started to if the exposure was longer.

The Face Project

I'm taking you back in time again today with another project I did at college. This time it's all about the face and during this unit we got to experiment will kinds of different techniques including darkroom and camera-less photography as well all sorts of digital stuff with flash and slow shutter speeds.

Experimentation in the Darkroom

At college we did a unit called "The Face" where we had the opportunity to to try come cool techniques in the darkroom.

Photogram

Photogram

Photogram

Photogram

Double negative

Solarisation

Scratched negative

Manipulated developer

Liquid light on sugar paper

Flash blur- experimenting on location

This is a technique that I learnt at the end of my first year at college and practised through the summer holidays. The way it works, is by using an external flash gun on camera with a slow shutter speed. When flash fires, where the light hits the subject is frozen and the long shutter speed captures movement (from either the subject or the photographer themselves). The result is this strange kind of mixture of sharpness and blurriness in the same image.

Over that summer I took many trips the park with my brothers and made them do all sort of strange things while I snapped away trying out this technique. Fortunately they were very patient with me. The whole thing is very unpredictable (thankfully I was shooting in digital or who knows how many roles of film I would have used!) and so I shot hundreds of photographs but these are a few of the ones that I think turned out quite well.

When I returned to college in September we were given the task of shooting flash blur with film, having had the summer to "master" the technique. I had a 24 exp film as so as not to waste any I really had to think about getting the balance between the flash and ambient exposures. With digital it was easy, I could see instantly if the image was over exposed, correct it accordingly and re-shoot. Obviously with film, you don't have that luxury, and so I found it much more challenging. 

Experimental blob technique

This is a technique my mum read about in a magazine. We thought it looked really cool so we decided to try it out. Basically, we just needed a clean, scratch free transparent surface to drip water on, the idea being that you would then photograph your subject though this surface so it became distorted though the water drops.

So we tried that using the glass from a photo frame however, as you can see, the result was less than successful! However, never one's to give up, we tried again, this time with drops of glycerine on the glass....

.... and this is how it looks, much closer to the images from the magazine. I continued to experiment with different coloured flowers and some different objects under the glass and, after much cropping, this is how they turned out.

This didn't really work as well as I'd hoped it would. Although it's out of focus, there's too much going on in the background with too many similar colours and so the blobs don't stand out as much as they do in the flower images.

 Not sure that this works too well either. This time, however, I don't think there's enough in the background. I mean lets face it; it's quite boring (also, looking at it now I can see that it's a little soft which probably doesn't help).