Cyanotype photography

Posted on 03 March 2010

Here is a project I did for my photo history class, this project is called “Cyanotype”. It is a type of photography that was done back in the earlier days of photography, it is a very simple and easy way to process negatives into positives, but with a blue color cast to the image. I actually like this blue color cast for some reason.

What we did was we order the Cyanotype kits of the internet and then mix the kit in the dark then turn our digital files into black and white negative images and print it out into a transparency(or if we want, we can use our 4×5 black and white negatives). Once the digital negative is printed, we take a sheet of 100% water color Rag paper into a dark room and spread the chemical (from the kit that we had mixed) and let it dry, we took the easy way out since time was limited and put the sheet into our dryer at school for a faster drying processes, than we place the negative over the dried spread chemical and have a piece of large glass over it with claps to make it stable and set it in the sun until the lime green chemical turns a dark shade of green. Once the chemical turns to the dark shade of green we bring it back into the building and let it sit under running water, the water will wash away all the access chemical and our image will be process. To have a deeper and richer blue, we mix a little peroxide with water and spread it over our image, that will give the photo a deep rich blue color.

Below are two images I had done, first one is the negative of my uncle picking rice from the rice field, it’s a photo I had taken about 3 years ago. Below that image is the cyanotype that I had done. I had left it in the sun a bit too long thus his face didn’t show much details besides the outline of his face.

Second is the digital negative of the photo I had taken of Yosemite national Park when I went to California last summer. I thought I had exposed this one almost perfectly, I shouldn’t had given it that much sun, but I did although I love the contrast of the cyanotype in this image. On the right side of the photo, you’ll see a line going straight through the cyanotype, that was the line from the glass, my piece of glass wasn’t so big thus it had shown a line where the piece of glass ended for this image, again I still like the image as it is..

The chemical only cost $20 and it makes a great amount of images, I am thinking about buying some more chemicals and make some cynotype as gifts to friends and family. You can actually be creative and do a lot of fun things with this process. Let’s see if I can find time to get creative with this process, as for now, enjoy the images.