Cyanaotype Printing Fun

YOu can get other colours too - but Iv’e not tried them

I’ve been meaning to play with Cyanotype printing for a while. You can buy the paper quite cheaply and using it is easy enough. It works as very slow film. Put something on top of a piece of the paper, expose it to light for a while (sunlight or uv light works best) and then wash the paper under the tap until an image appears. Parts of the paper that were exposed to light turn dark blue. Covered parts stay white.

The picture on the bottom right of the image above was created by putting some Lego tiles on a sheet of the picture and then leaving it on the windowsill for a while. You get a kind of “reverse shadow”. This works well with leaves, flowers and anything else that makes a nice mask.

So of course the next thing to do is put a black and white negative in front of the paper and expose that to light. So I dug out negatives from some pictures I took last year, borrowed a printing frame (it holds the negative tightly against the paper) and off I went.

Exposure is interesting. A really “thick” negative (one that was taken in bright light and has lots of dark silver emulsion on it) can take quite a while to expose. Particularly if the sun goes in half way through exposure. Thinner negatives (ones taken in darker situations) need a lot less time. The best way I’ve found to judge exposure is to peel back the paper from the negative and check what it looks like. The printing frame has a hinged backplate that lets you take a sneak peek at the print without moving it. If you can barely see the outline of the image this would be a good time to “develop” the picture under the tap. If you can see a very visible image this means that when you develop the picture the image will disappear to be replaced by a sea of white.

I took the pictures above with a Pentax 67 camera which produces negatives which are 6x7 cm in size (hence the name). These produce reasonably sized prints with a surprising amount of detail. The thing I really like about them is that these are completely analogue. There is no digital image processing at all, other than the shot I took to put the pictures on the blog.

What I really want is a frame which lets me take by lovely big 4x5 inch large format negatives and contact print those. Unfortunately I can’t find such a thing at the moment.

Note: I don’t think that cyanotype paper is in any way particularly poisonous, particularly once it has been “developed” under running water. But I wouldn’t give it to anyone who might feel inclined to lick or eat it.