Continuing to print the plates from the boxes of old dry plates I bought at the international photo fair in Bièvre. This is a very nice portrait. The print itself is probably overexposed, I have to get back to it and reduce the exposure time. But the highlights on the face looks good to me on this one.
This is a cyanotype print of an old silver gelatin dry plate. I really love to shop these old plates and discover some scenery from the early 20th century. They are very often in very good preservation state and completely usable. the contact print gives a very good level of details and it’s a pleasure to watch such picture. Probably not an original statement, but each picture is definitely like a time capsule.
Some prints that are actually a bit too dark when you have them in hand. The toning with coffee and yerba mate gives something close to sepia tones.
A few more picture from Cantal. Cyanotype toned with Mate and coffee. For any reason, I couldn’t get the tones as black as I wished. But I still like it this way.
We went to Cantal for a week of well deserved vacations (yes that’s true). This is a very beautiful region in the center of France, and we probably fall in love with it. Beautiful landscape, good food, lots of castles or other place to visit. What else one need ? It is a very rural area with an agriculture based on pastoral tradition. With the famous beef of Salers which is also a cheese. In the village of Salers you can also visit the gallery of a very good photographer and any his lith print.
So I’m printing a couple of pictures from my Instagram feed waiting to develop and scan or print the films I shoot during the week. I’m trying as much as possible to get the process reproducible for coffee + mate toning. Not yet 100% accurate, but it’s getting there.
A small series from the hikes we use to do with the family. This time printed in cyanotype with some toning coffee/maté. Actually I will make a toned version for all of them.
I can’t even remember clearly when was the last time we went to Indonesia. The file names from the instagram picture are telling me 2018. So I’m browsing through some of the insta pics again, and start a series from that past trip. Here we got one pic from Yogyakarta, and two from Bali. The quality is not so great as what is acceptable on the tiny screen of your phone is clearly awful on a large computer screen. The cyanotype process tends to blur a bit the issue, but that’s not the best. I’ll have to get rid of picture I really like in terms of composition.
Cyanotype on Hahnemühle Moulin du Coq Le rouge, toned with a mix of instant coffee and yerba maté.
While browsing on FB, there’s this guy in the cyanotype group who uses the paper moulin du coq – le rouge. AS he got some very good results, I decided to give it a try. Best deal I could find was a block of 100 sheets in 24×32 cm. So it better works in the end :). Bottom line is that I don’t think I’m gonna go back to the usual bristol I was using before. The texture is not so smooth, and you have to acidify it beforehand, but the extra step really worth it.
Here I got an example toned in a mix of mate and coffee. I did a very short bleaching set first (just a few seconds) so the Prussian blue actually turn to a more dark purplish color.
Various experiments with toning and papers.
Today, I just took some random stuff only table and put it in the printing frame with a sheet of cyanotype coated paper. 5 min under the UV light, and there you go, quick and dirty. Ok, the truth, is that I was very curious to see how much light this thing would let go through. So the first exposure was 30 minutes. this was way to much. So I did go with 5 min and that works fine. Could have added a few minutes though. And this is clearly the best use of this crap I’ve ever made.
