Here is a very soft image. Very little contrast due to a struggle with bleaching time (too long) and concentration (too strong). what is interesting here is that it almost didn’t lost any details. Toned in coffee. I’ll try to make another version with more exposure and less bleach. But overall, I’m pleased with the process, the brown from coffee are very nice, and even the taint in the white is not too much disturbing.
Subway is usually a good place to take picture. the one in Paris is over a century old and the use of an old process is to me a good fit for some of the image I can take there. But probably anything pictural is also some of interest to me at this point. What I really like here is the softness in the shadows’s transitions while keeping some overall contrast. Negative is not flipped, and fortunately there’s no readable words on the ad.
Here we go again with some toning. With Maté this time. This is the tea of the Argentinian people. They literally drink that all day long. It’s quite a bitter taste so I could imagine it has some tanins. Two years ago, we had an intern who has roots in south America, and he used to drink maté while we were having coffee. I knew this from a trip to Argentina, so I asked him if he could get a pack for me and my photographic experiments. It gives a nice brown. Here the picture was bleached first and then toned for 20 to 30 minutes.
Ok, while I was not satisfied with a specific negative, I tried to improve that. Took quite some time to remove most of the shadows and get details in the shadows. In the end it’s somehow better. Still not what I wanted it to be, but at least it’s building some xp. Here was can se a before and after. Difference in color is probably due to the fact I let the second one oxidize more before the scan. I also red on this topic that H2O2 was not necessary, and that’s right, besides the funny instant reward, there’s not much benefit about it.
There are subjects that do not fit very well with this scanning thing. Typically anything with white won’t cut out properly on the white background. Using a black background could be an option, but this would not work with the rest of the material.
What works (to my taste of course)
What doesn’t work so well:
This project of putting plants directly on the glass of the scanner and then print a negative in order to make a cyanotype print is really pushing me forward. It is exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for in order to explore more and more textures. This workflow allows me to get the maximum out of the raw material. I’m sure some might say this is a bit too much, but I’m clearly not looking for a representation of the real here. I’m looking to get over this in order to give simple leaves another dimension.
Some misc print that I’m doing on the journey of experimenting wit cyanotype. I’ve been using this technique for 7 years now, but there is still a lot to learn. Practice is the key as usual.
You can really manipulate the image in post when using digital negatives. This is an example of two prints made with really different post processing on the original file.
During Falls, actually this apply to all season, my daughter picks some leaves or different kind of artefacts from nature. They are then forgotten everywhere in the house. You could just through it back to the yard, but what if this could be used to make something pictural. So here it goes to the scanner, got some processing, and printed as a negative to make a cyanotype. I’m quite pleased how it turns. Now I’m the one picking stuff outside.
One thing that I wanted to experiment was to create a correction curve for digital negatives. Note, this is not a tutorial, there are many out there. There’s a straight forward way with ChartThrob if you have photoshop. With Gimp, you have to do it manually. So I created a grey chart from 0 to 100% white. Then inverted to negative and printed it. I make a cyanotype print. Once it is dry, I scanned it and convert it to grey with minimal change (desaturate). With that file, I measured the average grey for some of the squares. Actually it turns out that I didn’t get an even light on the width of the paper. Decided to just used the vertical line with the values 0, 10, 20, …., 100. That makes 11 point for the curve. Then a bit a calculation in excel, and we get the data for our curve. Save it and then reuse on another picture.
Here are some results, the same negative with the curve applied, on two different papers.
The Hahnemühle Sumi E. This is giving a lot of mid tones
My regular Canson bristol like. With this paper we have bit more highlights. Maybe it worth to expose a bit longer.
And here is the scanned chart. Here we can see the problem that the left column his actually more dense than the right column. This is something I need to fix at some point in order to get more values usable. But a 11 point curve is already a good start. I’ll make a curve with only the left column (10 points) and compare.
