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.

I found this reading on negatives to be very interesting in it’s explanation of the photogram. Christopher talks about how the photogram has a reduced ability when it comes to being able to produce a wide range of densities from the negative. As where with cyanotype or platinum there is a higher range of densities that are able to be taken from the negative. He also goes on to talk about Acrylic lift transparencies from printed sources, which reminded me of our hand sanitizer transfers we did in class. With this transfer technique we found that not over applying the hand sanitizer was the trick to avoiding the white spots on the final image.

After working with cyan and platinum & reading this chapter (in addition to the one on digital negatives) it has become very evident to me that the need for a dense negative is very important to the overall outcome of the image. Additionally, as far as digital negatives go, it is very important to adjust each image accordingly with a curve for each specific process and know how they will translate to the specific printer you are using. As I read in the book, in order to get an ideal contrasty negative that will translate well to the different mediums when using film you want to underexpose and overdevelop the film. I found this to be interesting and a lot simpler than trying to deal with a digital negative. Overall I found the process of negative construction to be a lot more complicated than expected.

In this first reading on the pinhole camera, I found a variety of useful information in regards to the construction of my own pinhole camera (cigar box). I found the equation that christopher james talked about in calculating the F-Value to be a very intriguing thing (Focal Length / Aperture Diameter). Christopher describes the pinhole as being a camera that “creates an image varying in size & viewpoint according to the distance between the aperture & the surface the image falls upon”. However the most important part of this read for me, was the historical background behind the first photograph, because I was actually able to see one of these first images at the Getty Museum in California this summer and ever since I saw it in person I’ve felt very interconnected with photography as an overall process. 

Just another way I find interesting in taking your work to the next level after the basics of printing have been done. http://www.alternativephotography.com/wp/post-printing/handcoloring-and-painting-photographs

Thought this was a cool way to push a cyanotype even further and make it more engaging. http://www.alternativephotography.com/wp/post-printing/making-a-pop-up-cyanotype

This summer I will interning doing some  photo archival, and I decided to read up on it. Found this article to provide exactly the kind of detail I was looking for. http://www.alternativephotography.com/wp/post-printing/archival-techniques-comments-on-the-past