Cyanotypes!

INTRODUCTION

Cyanotype refers to a photographic process that yield cyan colored prints. While most popular among engineer, who used it for reproducing large scale copies of technical drawings, it has some photographic uses as well. Despite its odd color, the simplicity of the process makes it quite appealing to amateurs and artists alike. Further, the color can be toned and bleached to produce more subdued tones.

PROCESS

The cyanotype is made up of two simple solutions:

• Solution A: 25 grams Ferric ammonium citrate (green) and 100 ml. water.
• Solution B: 10 grams Potassium ferricyanide and 100 ml. water.

These solutions are then mixed together in equal parts to make the sensitizer. Once A&B are mixed, they do not keep long, but stored separately, in light tight containers, they will keep for quite a while.

Away from UV light, this solution is then brushed onto your medium of choice and allowed to dry. The negative is then placed directly onto the paper and held in place with a piece of glass and masking tape. Similarly, one can use a photo frame or printing easel to accomplish this.

The print is then exposed to UV. On a sunny May day at 43 degree latitude, my exposure took roughly 15 minutes.

The print is then washed in a simple water bath for both developing and fixing. The subsequent image can be toned with tea or the like, bleached with ammonia, or toned with traditional toning methods.

HISTORY

Invented by Sir John Herschel in 1842, he chiefly used the cyanotype as a method for reproducing his notes and diagrams. The simplicity and economy of this process also made it the choice reproduction method amongst architects and engineers. If you have seen blueprints before, this is how they are made!

While Sir Herschel developed the method, we owe credit to Anna Atkins for its photographic use. She created books containing cyanotype photograms of seaweed, ferns and other plantlife from her extensive natural collection. Her use of the cyanotype also secures her the title of first female photographer!

RESULTS

The process was very simple to carry out. My negatives were once again too contrasty. I guess I took it too far from the flat ones I was printing earlier in the quarter. However, the prints are clearly visible and demonstrate good tonal ability.

My two geese:

My paternal grandparents circa 1940:

EXAMPLES OF CYANOTYPE PRINTING
Modern – Terry King – Toned Cyanotpe c. 2007

Historical – Photogram, Anna Atkins c. 1850 – Typical cyanotype color:

LINKS

History – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanotype

Process – http://www.alternativephotography.com/wp/processes/cyanotype/cyanotype-classic-process

Van Dyke Brown Prints

INTRODUCTION

The Vandyke print is know for its rich, chocolaty brown color. It is named because of its similarity to the the deep brown pigment used by the Flemish painter Van Dyck. The iron used in the process is responsible for the characteristic color.

PROCESS

The following three solutions should be prepared separately. Combine A & B, then slowly add C while stirring. The final solution must be left to sit in a dark place a few days before use.

Solution A
Ferric Ammonium Citrate    9.0 gm
Distilled Water                  33.0 ml

Solution B
Tartaric Acid                      1.5 gm
Distilled Water                  33.0 ml

Solution C
Silver Nitrate                       3.8 gm
Distilled Water                  33.0 ml

Away from UV light, this solution is then brushed onto your medium of choice and allowed to dry. The negative is then placed directly onto the paper and held in place with a piece of glass and masking tape. Similarly, one can use a photo frame or printing easel to accomplish this.

The print is then exposed to UV (sun) light. On a sunny May day at 43 degree latitude, my exposure took roughly 4 minutes.

The print is then rinsed in a H2O & citric acid bath. The citric acid lowers the pH, aiding in removal of the iron compounds. Following this are two weak Hypo baths- 2 minutes @ 5% each. The final step is a 30-40 minute water rinse.

HISTORY

The Vandyke is based on the first iron-silver process, the argentotype, invented in 1842 by the English astronomer, Sir John Herschel. The process was devised in 1899 by WJ Nichol. Aside from photography, it was also used as an alternative to blueprints in architectural circles.

RESULTS

Overall I was very pleased with this process. The brown tones are subtle, yet very pleasing, much less harsh than traditional black and white prints. Coupled with the low-contrast negatives I had, the resulting images are very subdued and peaceful.
My love and ever-willing model, Hannah:

Canadian Geese in flight:

EXAMPLES OF VAN DYKE PRINTING
Modern – Jamie Young

Historical – Unknown

Links

http://unblinkingeye.com/Articles/Vandyke/vandyke.html

http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/1_early/1_early_photography_-_processes_-_kallitype.htm

Coated Paper Prints

Once again, in our quest to understand the progression of 19th century photographic processes, we attempted another round of photogenic drawings. This time our substrate was coated paper. For this lab we tried 3 different coatings: gelatin, arrowroot and albumen.

Coating the paper serves two purposes. First, all three of the coatings contain the NaCl, which is needed to react with the AgNO3 to create our light sensitive silver halides. Second, it forms a barrier, decreasing the permeability of the paper. This keeps the applied AgNO3 on the surface of the paper, where we want our image to form.

PROCESS

The three recipes used are as follows.

Gelatin:
1000 ml      Water
20 g               NaCl
2 g                  Gelatin
– In a double boiler, heat the water. Mix in the other ingredients and stir until completely dissolved. While still hot, brush evenly onto your paper. Even application is key, as the solution contains the salt that will convert the AgNO3 into light sensitive silver halides. Pooling of the solution will deposit excess NaCl as it dries, causing irregularity in print density.

Arrowroot:
17 g          Arrowroot powder
17 g          NaCl
1.5 g         Citric Acid
475 ml    Water
– In a double boiler, heat the water. Mix in the other ingredients and stir until completely dissolved. Brush evenly onto your paper. Even application is key, as the solution contains the salt that will convert the AgNO3 into light sensitive silver halides. Pooling of the solution will deposit excess NaCl as it dries, causing irregularity in print density.

Albumen:
~ 12          Eggs (500 ml Egg Whites)
15 g          NaCl
2 ml         Acetic Acid (vinegar)
15 ml       Distilled Water

– Carefully Separate the egg whites from the yolk. Strain the whites through cheesecloth to remove stringy white parts. Add the remaining ingredients and shake until foam. Allow mixture to sit for at least a couple days, but the longer the better. After sitting, apply 1 or 2 coats of albumen (more coats=more gloss) evenly to your substrate by folding up the edges of the paper and laying it face down in the emulsion. Hang by a corner from line and drip dry.
Things to note: Do NOT get emulsion on the back of the paper, it will warp the surface as it dries (see photo below) & dry each coating fully before applying subsequent coatings.

– Away from UV light, AgNO3 is brushed onto your coated papers and allowed to dry. The negative is then placed directly onto the paper and held in place with a piece of glass and masking tape. Similarly, one can use a photo frame or printing easel to accomplish this.

The print is then exposed to UV (sun) light. On a sunny April day at 43 degree latitude, my exposures took roughly 2-4 minutes, but this will vary greatly depending on your negative.

– The exposed print is then washed in water and fixed in hypo, with a final 30 minute wash for archivability.

HISTORY

Albumen
The albumen process was invented by the Frenchman Louis Desire Blanquart in his quest to improve the Caltoype. He found two benefits in coating his paper this way. First, the albumen in the egg white proved an excellent binder between the AgNO3 and the paper. Second, it produced a smooth, lustrous gloss capable of recording finer detail than uncoated or matte finished paper. Additionally, the resulting prints were less prone to fading. Upon his disclosure of this technique to the French Academy of Sciences in 1850, it quickly became the most popular printing process and remained so for approximately 50 years until the introduction of Gelatin paper .

RESULTS

Albumen
I was not at all happy with the albumen process, though perhaps this is just due to my inexperience with it. I had issues with adhesion and with applying the albumen neatly. On one piece of paper, it dripped down the backside, leaving a large crease in the paper when it dried.

I didn’t even bother to print on this one.

On my second sheet, featuring two coats, the second coat did not adhere well. You can see in the following image where the albumen flaked off – it’s where it dripped down the page as it was drying, hung from the lower right corner.

My gelatin and arrowroot papers are much more pleasing. However, they present the characteristic unevenness of application that comes from printing on a porous substrate. Here is the gelatin image:

Here is the arrowroot image:

While my exposure is off due to bad negatives, both coatings proved viable. You can see the streaking due to application that I mentioned above. I applied the AgNO3 and brushed it around as quick as I could, but to no avail. While my arrowroot presented a greater Dmax, I prefer the tonality of the gelatin and will attempt some more during week 11.

EXAMPLES OF ALBUMEN PRINTING
Modern – Chad Jarvis, gold toned albumen print:

Historical – Charles Bayliss

Links
http://www.photoconservation.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=47:albumen&catid=37:photographic-processes&Itemid=57

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albumen_print

Photogenic Drawing: Take 2

For a description of the history and process of photogenic drawing , invented by Mr. Fox Talbot of England, see the earlier post below or by clicking here.

In our second photogenic drawing lab, we set out to test the effect of colored light on our exposures and to perfect our photogenic printing technique. The setup and effects can be seen below.

↑ – Here is the colored gel setup. You can see the paper, mounted and coated on a board, gels placed on top, held in place with a sheet of glass, taped to prevent movement.  The slight graying of the paper is after approximately one minute of exposure. The colors, from left to right are Purple, Dark Blue, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red. The pretzel(bite-size) was added for comic effect and scale.

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↑ – Here are the results! Clearly, the two blue patches show the most exposure. All the patches with yellow or red show little exposure. What does this tell us? The blue part of the spectrum is responsible for most of the exposure of our images. (On a side note, the pretzel’s silhouette is fuzzy because it was on top of the glass, not directly against the paper. This caused it to cast a diffused shadow.)

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↑ – The right hand portion of the board above is my personal print from this lab. I chose my pieces for a few reasons. First, I love nature! I am always amazed at its beauty and uniqueness. Second, botanical documentation was by far the largest use of photogenic drawing in the initial phase of its use. Third, I was hoping that the translucence of my objects would lead to some tonality in my final print.

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↑ – Here is the result of my exposure (10 minutes, sunny day, April, 43 parallel).
Top Left – This creeping vine was far too dense to allow any reaction to take place in the ten minutes of exposure. Being thick and green, (reference colored gel photos above) this is not a surprise.
Right – The maple leaf was much thinner. You can see some effect where there were tears, holes and other thin spots in the leaf. Although, this is still not the ‘tonality’ I was hoping for. There really aren’t any gray-tones to speak of. Perhaps a longer exposure would have had more effect.
Bottom Left – This was a piece of birch bark, just a couple layers thick in some spots. My highest hopes for tonality lay with this piece, as it was quite translucent in some areas. However, while white on the face, the back of each layer is an orange-ish color. As we now now, orange light does not expose the paper well! Again, longer exposure times or stronger light may have yielded some results.

Any gray tones seen along the edges of the three pieces above are the result of the piece not being in direct contact with the paper during exposure. They are not the result of exposure through the item, rather from light leaking around it’s edges. The thickness of the stems prevented the glass from compressing the piece completely flat.

Camera Obscura

The Camera Obscura –  what a wonderful invention! To this device (or rather, phenomena?) do we owe credit for the birth of photography. Let’s start with the basics. Etymology: camera (Latin for chamber/room) + obscura (Latin for dark) = darkened room. In it’s basic form that’s just what it is – a darkened room, with a small hole, or aperture, at one end. This aperture serves to focus scattered light rays bouncing off exterior objects into a coherent, albeit inverted, image projected on the opposite wall.

The Concept

The Effect

The effect of light being focused by a small aperture has been known to keen observers since around 400BC, most notably by the Chinese philosopher Mo-Ti and the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Up to the 13th century, the phenomena of light being focused by an aperture was mostly a novelty, with records of some camera obscuras being set up to view notable scenes. Its first practical use came in the 13th century when Roger Bacon noted that one could use it to safely view the sun during a solar eclipse. Sometime around the 15ht century, artists began to use it as a drawing aid, mainly to achieve realistic perspective.

Eventually people got to thinking that, rather than an artist tracing the projected image, the light itself could be made to permanently fix an image. The work of Niepce, Daugerre, Herschel, Talbot and countless others married with the camera obscura to give rise to photography as we know it today.

One of the biggest problems with a camera obscura using simple hole as an aperture is the small amount of light allowed to pass. This makes for a very dim image and, in the case of photography, long exposure times. To counter this problem, it was eventually realized that a lens could be used to gather a greater quantity of light. Further, a second lens could be added to project a right-side-up image. However, the use of a lens created a new issue while solving an old one: focus. The small size of a simple hole in relation to the length of the room/camera, provided for a great depth of field, negating the need to consider focusing the image; everything was in focus. A lens on the other hand has a specific focal length. In a stationary, room-sized camera obscura, maintaining focus was not of much concern. However, in smaller, portable camera obscuras, as used by artists and photographers, this was a very real concern, but one well worth the trade.

For my own camera obscura, I used a lens from a $3 magnifying glass bought at a local retailer. I measured its focal length with a ruler. To do this, I held the lens near a wall in a darkened room, opposite a bright window. This causes the lens to throw an image onto the wall. I then moved the lens back and forth from the wall, noting at what point the projected image was sharpest. Measuring this distance with a ruler, I now had the focal length of my lens.

With the focal length in mind, I set out to find a suitably sized box. A quick trip to the post office beneath by apartment revealed a medium sized flat rate box to a near perfect fit. I cut one side of the box off and taped a piece of plain white printer paper over it, oiled to increase transparency. This serves as the surface onto which the image is projected.

I then found a 3″ diameter cardboard tube to house my lens in. I cut a corresponding hole in the box opposite the oiled paper and slid the tube with the mounted lens into it. Finally, the camera obscura completed, I taped it to my tripod, placed a dark cloth over my head and aimed it out my window at sunset. Sliding the tube in and out to achieve optimum focus, I viewed a live color image of a cloudy sunset, inverted of course!

Camera Obscura

Lens and focusing tube, taken from magnifying glass.

Oiled paper back (note the oil seepage from paper to box).

Here is a digital photograph of the image projected by my camera obscura. It is unaltered, except for being inverted right side up.

For my next camera obscura, I will definitely make the following modifications. First, I need a more sturdy box. The postal service flat rate box didn’t have the structural integrity to withstand strechting the oiled paper tightly across the back and sliding the focusing tube in and out. Consequently, my paper was wavy, so I could not achieve uniform focus across. Additionally, oiled paper is not an ideal projection screen. It’s, well, oily. Not something I fancy putting my face near. And it’s hard to tape down. If one does use the oiled paper method, as opposed to wax paper or ground glass or the like, be careful to keep the oil well away from the taped edges; it has a tendency to spread through the fibers far beyond the area of application. Remember, a camera obscura can be as simple as a Quaker Oats box with a hole punched in the bottom and paper taped over the top. This is a cool experiment that everyone should try once! It’s a great way to become intimate with a process so ubiquitous it is often taken for granted. Good Luck!

Photogenic Drawings

Photogenic drawing is the name given to a printed out paper process invented by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1839. Also known as a Calotype, this contact printing process yields a negative image and was Talbot’s own continuation of prior methods developed by Thomas Wedgwood. A thorough explanation of how the Calotype fits into the history of photography can be found here. A period explanation of the process, as found in The Photographic Art Journal – Vol 1, 1851, can be read here.

The process for creating a photogenic drawing is as follows.
In a darkened room:

1. Soak paper in a 1-3% NaCl solution
2. Allow to dry
3. Brush on AgNO3; 2-3 coats at 12-14% concentration
4. Allow to dry
5. Place object on sensitized paper
6. Expose paper to daylight until exposed areas darken to personal taste (approx. 1-10 minutes, depending on latitude, time of day and cloud cover)

If done correctly, the results should look as follows:

Photogenic Drawings – Jamie Wróbel 2011.

As you can see in the photos above, my first attempt at photogenic drawings highlights some of the issues with the process, or any hand-coated process for that matter. The images show streaking from uneven chemical application. Also, the middle image presents with an odd color shift.
The leftmost image is a silhouette of a car key, the middle a cell phone, and the right a carabiner. These images were made by exposing the sensitized paper to full sunlight for approximately 5 minutes (@ 43° latitude)

For an example of how successful this process can be, let’s look at some of Mr. Talbot’s own work:

    ~ Lace – 1844                         

~ Heather, Erica mutabilis – 1839

~ Leaf – 1840

This particular printing photographic process lends itself well to flat objects that can be easily laid on paper. As such, Talbot and many others used it to document botanical specimens.

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In this lab we tried many different recipes, varying solution strengths and the number of coats. Talbot’s recipe proved the most effective even after 160 years. The reasons for this lie in the nature of the chemical reaction. Silver Nitrate (AgNO3) and Salt (NaCl) engage in a double replacement reaction, yielding light-sensitive AgCl and NaNO3. Too much or too little of either ingredient and the reaction does not produce the maximum amount of AgCl.

This lab was very fun; these are the first photographic prints I have made in 5 years! But I am more eager for the next step, making positive prints. This is so tantalizingly close to how I learned photography – in a darkroom with film, paper and chemicals. That’s how it should be done!

Anthotypes: Fruity photographs

Anthotypes are a type of photography in a very basic sense. They are visual information recorded with light: photo-graphs. The process involves coating a medium (usually paper) with the juices extracted from some organic matter, such as berries, fruits or flowers and allowing it to dry. Shapes or objects are then placed on top of the paper, which is then exposed to direct sun light. This exposure fades the dried matter, where visible, leaving behind an image of the outline of the object that had been placed on the paper.

Some organic matter works better than others and how you get the juices out also appears to affect the quality of the anthotype, i.e. how quickly one can get results, how much contrast can be achieved and how much detail can be shown. Further affecting these characteristics are the intensity of the sun, the substrate used and the nature of the object used to block the sunlight. An opaque object will yield the most contrast. Things like fabric, which allows some light to pass  through, will not produce as much contrast.

Anthotypes have been made since 1842 when they were invented by Sir John Herschel of England. They continue to be used today by fine artists and amateurs alike. However, the main issue to this day remains image permanence. This is dependent, in part, on the type of organic matter used.

Some modern examples:

Malin Fabbri – Red Tulip

Jenny Newman – Weed

For my own attempt, I applied a tincture made from 25mL denatured alcohol, 12 spinach leaves, 8 blackberries and .5 oz of blackberry juice. This mixture was crushed with a mortar and pestle and then filtered through a fine wire mesh strainer. The strained juice (and fine organic bits) were then applied to a piece of watercolor paper with a 1″ brush. Four coats of this tincture, applied in alternate directions and allowed to dry between coats, provided a very dark raspberry type color. Paper cutouts were then taped on top of the paper. The final piece was hung in my living room window.

After just one day, there was slight, but noticeable, fading. Lifting the cutout shapes revealed that the exposed color had lost some of its green shade compared with the unexposed area.  This is quite exciting, as it was by design that this happened. In choosing to use two plant juices in combination, I hoped to achieve a dual toned image, on the assumption that the two colors would not fade at equal rates. This appears to be the case. Hopefully more time will reveal a greater difference in color. Additionally, the shapes applied are of various thicknesses and colors. I hope the emulsion is sensitive enough to reveal further differences in fade rates due to this.

Day Zero – Shapes applied

Day 3 – Notice the faint dark spot where the triangle was.