Sun printing is fun printing

Good to know.

Good to know.

2 Likes

That’s lovely! Frame it, you should. :slight_smile:

For inspiration, Man Ray did a lot of work with the photogram.

4 Likes

Given the packaging, look like a pinhole camera setup would work with it.

2 Likes

I’ve wondered about this for years, but been unable to find any info on exposure. I expect using a pinhole setup (at what? f/120 or so?) would require a looooooooooooong exposure. Like, maybe days. And is there any reciprocity failure?

According to wikipedia, 10-20 minutes seem to be sufficient :

1 Like

But that’s for doing an exposure outside of a camera, doing e.g. a contact print. A pinhole camera would be different – the flood of UV light that you would use under normal sunprint exposure conditions would be slowed to a trickle. f/120 is a tiny amount of light for an average-sized camera.

You beat me to it! In my first college photography class we started out with photograms, before even doing anything with cameras.

Like @jlw, I remember using the blue sun-sensitive paper as a kid. It was at summer camp—I remember using ferns, that I placed to look like pine trees in a landscape, and cutting block letters from paper to spell the name of the camp. Wish i still had that print.

Seems like jlw-and-kid’s prints could be really nice made into greeting cards—you could cut out letters for “Happy Birthday” or somesuch, or maybe use string to write it in cursive?

Very well. But of course with a lens you can take cyanotypes of images too.

2 Likes

Does that do grayscale?

1 Like

Yep! You can even do proper photography with the process.

I mean does the ink jet transparency handle gray scale, or is it just a way of making high contrast graphics, the way it’s always demonstrated in every video I’ve watched so far?

Inconclusive.

1 Like

oh, sorry, I misunderstood the question.

Cyanotypes can definitely handle greyscale, transparencies I have no idea about.

Looks interesting.

1 Like

2 quick notes - After you’ve done your initial wash/fix try adding the print to another wash containing water with a splash of hydrogen peroxide (maybe 1/2 oz to a gallon of water) to instantly oxidize the print to give a much deeper blue color.

Also after you’ve finished washing your print you can try toning the print with tea, coffee or a variety of other materials: http://www.alternativephotography.com/multi-colored-cyanotypes/

2 Likes

In Richmond the Visual Arts Center recently broke the record for largest cyanotype. You can buy the dye directly and soak fabric in it, or coat paper in it, at any size, which is pretty cool.

1 Like
2 Likes

Thanks for the reminder! I wrote this (pretty specific) blog post about sun printing with transparencies–please enjoy : )

(http://blogs.britannica.com/2013/08/celebrated-summer-making-sun-prints-transparencies/)

I usually expose a cyanotype for 2-5 minutes, depending on the strength of the sunlight. You can use longer exposure times if the image is dense or dark.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.