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Cyanotype

When my sister came into the college she said something that really stuck in my mind, " You don't need a camera to take a photograph". I really liked this idea and was looking into making my own camera when i came across something called Cyanotype, Cyanotype is a really old photographic printing process that produces prints using the sun, in a greenish-blue. I was so excited to try this i ordered Cyanotype paper to try this out as part of my photography unit.


I think i want to do a series of images with these, the kit comes with 15 sheets of paper so i am going to use a few to try out and experiment with and then see where it takes me.

I started by looking at artists that use Cyanotype and came across Anna Atkins who was an English botanist and photographer. She used cyanotype photography to record botanical specimens for a scientific book "British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions" 




 I really like how this looks, and decided to start with flowers and plants for my own experiments.


This one did not turn out very well but I got the hang of it as I continued, I tried using man made objects and things i use everyday to see how they turned out.

I used. Knife, a paint brush, some coins,hair clips, tea bag, loose tobacco (I really end liked how that turned out, hair bobbles, a mushroom, a tomato, a cracker, rice, a eye brow brush and pepper. I went back to the flower print and left it in the sun for only 5 minutes ...


This one turned out well, i really like this kind of photography and i wanted to keep going a little bit more so i thought about if i could make a scene? I cut out a turtle on a bit of paper and added tea leaves across the top of it, then used my hair to create this...


I really like this and the effect of the hair and the tea leaves i think work well, the turtle could be more obvious but i think for a first attempt it is ok. i tried again this time adding water drops i really like this one it is much cleaner.

 I will think about what i want to do and turn this into another little series for my photography unit, i just need to think about the theme my world, my view.... very excited to expand on this! 

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