Continuing on this journey of letting various plants & flowers drying around, then scan them directly and making a cyanotype print from a digital negative. I have not yet decided if I’ll tone that one or not. Maybe make another one and keep the blue one. Next step in the project is to find a way to bind them and make a small book from the original prints.
As I was developing a few 8×10 which were waiting for a while the other day, I found this one which I haven’t yet printed. Again coffee toned.
Here we go, since we are locked down again and all activities with the photo club are on hold, I got my hands on a printer in order to play with digital negatives. Usually I only use large format negatives but some of the ideas I have lately are really not handy to be executed that way. There was some flowers drying on my desk for a while, decided to scan them, play a bit with the file, and printed a digital negative. Then standard cyanotype print followed by a light coffee toning. This is clearly changing the pace of getting a print ready. I can go from idea to realization within the same day, and don’t loose the focus as I’m not doing this full time, but only have 1 to 2 hours once every two days to enjoy this.
I had this cyanotype print which didn’t have enough details, the head of the subject did not pop out from the background. So I tried to apply what was experienced before. So I used Carbonate potassium to get more light to the picture, and then toned with coffee. I end up with a less contrasty image which I think is a fit for this kind of picture. The two pictures below are scans of the same sheet of paper and both raw from the scanner.
I have found a formula using carbonate potassium on a FB group which gave very nice results. It is a process that I still have to apply. In the mean time I wanted to understand the effect of this compound. One of the effect is bleaching. So I used a very diluted solution in order to brighten a bit a print which was exposed for too long. The first one is exposed for 5 minutes and not modified. The second one is exposed for 6 minutes and then went into the Carbonate potassium bath. There is a bit of contrast loss, but clearly we can get back some details in the shadows. I don’t have the overexposed print for comparison though.
Playing with coffee toning. This is one of my favorite black rendering toner for cyanotype. Here we can see the difference between the standard print, and the toned one. I have experienced few years ago with bleaching first, and will probably get there again. I have seen some formulas using carbonate potassium.
I got some Hahnemühle Sumi E paper some time ago. This is quite interesting to make cyanotype with it. The paper absorb a lot of the solution and is acid free, so this is probably not the best for that. Nevertheless, I got some good result with the first try. I dipped it in coffee for toning, and it basically take ages to get some taint. I will try to bleach it first and see what happen.
Got some Washi film developed and scanned a few of them. I let it flat for quite a while so I’m not 100% sure which one it was. I’d say Whashi S as I don’t recall buying anything else in 120.
This is some time of year with good motivation to go to the darkroom and spend time practicing wet plate collodion process. I have to say I really enjoy the process, it is a mix of very accurate and totally impossible to control parameters. I was collecting rocks from various places from quite a while and had this idea of setting them for such process.
I love this process, this need a bit more planning than other processes I’m experimenting. Scans are not so great though, this is something you need to see irl.
