Seriously old school
Technologically speaking, I seem to be regressing.
Been using my high end Canon camera with all the whizz bang features and fancy lenses for a while.
And then I go and buy some cheapie plastic cameras and start having fun with 35mm film again.
This weekend I went one step farther back to luddite-ville. I went to Cyanotype. Known to the real world as Sunlight Prints.
Billed as a toy for kids, I’m having a heck of a lot of fun. I bought a kit off a sale table at Barnes & Noble a while back and used up (and ruined most of) the paper. Then I bought a paper refill at a toy store and kept trying. My technique is improving.
The whole thing is a chemical process kicked off by ultraviolet light from the sun.
So you get this light blue piece of paper with the right stuff chemical on it, compose your arrangement of items (in the shade), expose to the sun, then rinse it off with water and voila!
This is the same stuff that original blueprints were made from.
I guess Cyanotype isn’t so out of style, though, because in one of the buildings where I work, they have a huge art installation of sunlight prints on slabs of wood showing a variety of ferns. It’s gorgeous! Maybe I should peddle my prints for a buck to the powers that be at work, eh? *grin*
Anyhow, here I am, rocking it 1842 style! With a little help from a blooming rose bush in my front yard and a sunny April Saturday afternoon.
(These scans don’t do the Prussian blue any sort of justice. Also, where you see a double image, that’s because the wind was blowing my compositions around….)
