There are a few things I found out through the reading and experience about working with platinum/palladium. The first thing is that the quality and type of paper is very important in how the overall print turns out. It must be durable, with no buffering due to the long rinsing times. Rule of thumb was: stay away from texture & anything that can’t soak for more than 30 minutes without being destroyed. More specifically and according to Christopher, you want to get buffering with a PH level between 5.5 & 7.5. So before you even start printing both Christopher and Ken suggested that you want to make sure you have a paper that will have good results for platinum/palladium printing otherwise you’re going through the entire process for nothing.

This section goes over using fabric as the medium for cyanotype and how it is applied. The best way to do this is coat it in the darkroom leave it to hang and then wait for a sunny day and expose it outside in my personal opinion. I noticed that some people in class were having problems with fabric, like turning yellow or weird colors that it shouldn’t have. So with that in mind I stayed away from using fabric, plus I find that I am really rough on my materials, so a sturdier medium was better suited to me personally. However, the different types of mediums that he discusses in the reading inspired me to explore and further my cyanotype experiments. In the future I plan on trying to use wood as a medium for the image. Almost forgot to mention that christopher emphasized on using a large body of water for rinsing these larger fabric prints.

This part of the book talked about the various precautions to take if you want to make a cyan with different colors, such as Basic tea toner. I found this to be very interesting, but was more intrigued by the fact that you can tone a cyan print with cat urine (fact courtesy of Thomas & Austin). When doing cyan myself I found that I liked the idea of sticking to the original cyan process (blue toned). The major difficulty with cyan printing and all contact print processes is that if you don’t have a fan or some sort of cooling device in your UV oven it will overheat and continually cause you to need longer exposures. I found this out the hard way of course, as did many in our class.

In class we learned about Anna Atkins who was one of the first people & women to use the cyanotype process. She created books documenting and preserving algae & various plants. To some extent she was the first person to apply photography to scientific method/purpose. Today the book is still remembered as one of the first to study botany photographically. By coating  pieces of paper with the cyan chemicals and placing the plant/algae in a contact frame, she contact printing the objects directly onto the paper.