One of the many things I love about cyanotypes is their flexibility. I was talking about how to make cyanotypes with a friend and one of the questions she asked was, “Can you make cyanotypes from color film negatives?” I had no answer. Before she went off to work in Antarctica for a few months […]
Cyanotypes + Color Film Negatives Read More »
Cyanotypes are one of the earliest methods for putting a photographic image on paper. Sir John Herschel experimented in 1842 with a method of coating paper with light-sensitive iron salts, exposing the paper to sunlight, and then washing with water. The result was a cyanotype, named for one of the chemicals used, potassium ferricyanide, which
Cyanotype: The Arctic Blue Read More »
Cyanotype can be delicate, at least cyanotypes printed on rag paper. Arches Platine is a wonderful paper — shockingly strong. But any paper that spends over a half hour being washed in a water bath is having a grueling experience. Sometimes, it shows. The photo sensitive coating is intended to soak into the paper fibers.
I never expected to become an alchemist. If anyone had told me that I would spend hours under a red light in a dark room mixing chemicals, I would not have believed them. And yet here I am, and it is magical. The first enchanted moment is coating paper. Once the chemicals are mixed they
The Unexpected Alchemist Read More »
Most of the thinking work in creating a cyanotype lies in making a digital negative from an existing image. This… is not easy. Once you get past all the testing to determine your max blue which tells you the length of exposure time, to figure out what the proper curve is to deliver a correctly
The Digital Negative Read More »
Ultramarine. Cobalt. Indigo. Lapis. Sapphire. Navy. The list of names for blue is nearly endless. Across gender and ethnicity, blue is most people’s favorite color. My heart was captured by the blue fire of arctic ice – a color so intense, so strange, it was difficult for me to believe it was real. That is