A couple of months ago, I was casually scrolling through my various social media accounts when I stumbled across a reel of someone reproducing an image of a plant that resulted in a picture with a strong, royal blue shading. I’ve seen these kinds of images before but never really thought much about them. I’ve recently acquired a bad habit of checking the cost of art supplies whenever I encounter something new and interesting and that day was no different. “Okay, Amazon has ‘sun printing’ kits or $70,” I pondered to myself, “but do you really need all that stuff?” Straight to YouTube I went and after watching a few tutorials, I realized that all I really needed to buy were the chemicals. Let’s pause here for a moment.

“What the heck are you rambling about, woman?”, you’re probably thinking at this point. The reel I watched on that fateful day was of an old photographic process called cyanotype. Unlike the kind of photography that dominated throughout the 20th century, cyanotype uses iron salts instead of silver nitrate as the active ingredient, if you will. And while silver nitrate film needs light followed by several chemical baths to produce an image, all cyanotype needs is sunlight (technically, needs UV light) and water.

The official invention of the cyanotype process is credited to Sir John Herschel who’s 1842 paper on the reaction of iron compounds to light is considered the beginning of cyanotype. Fun fact: if the name Herschel sounds familiar, his father was astronomer, Sir William Herschel, the discoverer of the planet George, later renamed Uranus. Sir John’s sunt Caroline Herschel was also a notable astronomer in her own rights. Back to cyanotype. There were actually several people looking at iron salts and their behavior to light but as these discoveries go, Herschel built on this knowledge and his paper was the one that announced the cyanotype process to the world.

So, what is this process? There have, of course, been many refinements and variations from Herschel’s original process over the years. This is how I did mine. The chemicals in question are potassium ferrocyanide and ferric ammonium citrate which in the Jacquard set come as a powder in two bottles. You add water to both bottles to prepare your stock solutions which are stable and can be stored for at least a year. To make your ‘film’, you mix equal parts of the two solutions and paint them onto you medium. I tried different types of watercolor and acrylic papers but have yet to pick a favorite. You’re not limited to paper though, as the cyanotype process can be used on all kind of mediums like fabric and wood. This step is best done in low light so you don’t expose your film too early. Leave your painted paper ‘film’ to try somewhere dark. Once dry, you can start the fun part! Take your paper out and quickly arrange your subject on the film you made and take it to a UV source like the sunlight outside. I left mine outside for 10 minutes to achieve the images in the post. After exposure, wash the ‘film’ paper in cold water with gentle rocking motion and voila – you have a cyanotype print!

There are endless ideas that could produce an endless number of photos using this process. I quick look through just the Wikipedia entry for cyanotype gets the wheels turning in my mind. So yes, you will see more of my blue experimentations but I hope you enjoyed this little introduction to a very old style of photography

#photography #yxephotographer #yxe #cyanotype