Well, this blog has gone beyond abandoned to bereft, forlorn, and all those nasty adjectives that make me feel super guilty. I’m sorry I haven’t posted in so long. I’m even more sorry that I haven’t been able to actually do any work.
Brief update – we now have 3 kids, and the last, Kelton, is 11 month old now. If trying to keep up with 2 kids was crazy then dealing with 3 under the age of four is insane. I’m just now starting to catch my breath and start inching toward beginning my cyanotype work again. I wanted to enter some photographs into the recent county fair here ( I know, quaint! that’s the best I can do right now!) and I was seriously depressed to only find pictures of my kids that I could work with. Good pictures of my kids, true, but very one-note. So…here’s to new beginnings and grand promises that I probably won’t be able to keep.
So, first I have to admit: these aren’t my photographs. Nope! But it doesn’t really matter because you can’t tell what they’re supposed to be anyway. We hosted a French exchange student this summer, and while she was here we tried printing some of her photographs in cyanotype. Wow, what a difference location makes!
I vividly remember struggling with the heavily chlorinated water in NY when I printed, but I finally found the process that worked for that set-up. Here it’s totally different. We tried to print using the same process and the prints looked like we fogged them in direct sunlight for a minute or more. It was bad!
There seems to be some sort of chemical reaction in this water as well. I’m not a chemist, so I can’t explain what the problem is. So far, it looks like I’m going to have to do a single coat of emulsion, maybe skip the sizing, and probably adjust my curve to account for wonky effects.
I have a Herculean task ahead anyway due to a new printer. It’s not an HP, so I can’t hope that the ink is the same. It’s a very basic Epsom workhorse that we needed for office stuff, although it prints fairly decent photographs too. I’m probably going to be working through a ton of charts as I figure out how this Epsom printer does with digital negatives. And since I have almost nil free time that’s going to take a while. Boring!
MP Photography 