Sunography and Cyanotypes

  It was my first wedding anniversary last week and my wife and i got each other a few presents in celebration.  Hidden amongst the graphic novels, jeans and camera-related treats was an A4 sized envelope of something i hadn't seen before.  It was a package of Sunography cyanotype paper.  A quick read of the instructions revealed that all i had to do was expose the provided paper in sunlight for a period of time, wash it and voila-a cyanotype!

  Well we had our first sunny day yesterday so i set to work.  I put a sheet on top of a hardback book, put some negatives on top and placed a sheet of glass over them.  I sat them in sunlight for 15 minutes and then rinsed in cold water for a few minutes.  For some reason some of the images rinsed off in the water (hmmm...) but one of them stayed and looked great.  Im really looking forward to exposing the rest of the sheets.

  I noticed this morning that on the Silverprint website they sell a kit that contains chemicals etc to make your own cyanotype.  It costs a little more than the Sunography paper but it seems you can get more mileage out of it and you get the fun of mixing your own chemicals and exposing them onto whatever material you want.  Ill probably be giving that a try at some point in the future.

  Im hoping to print one of my photos onto a large sheet of acetate and try and expose that onto the paper-hopefully it will turn out well.  You can place pretty much anything you like over it and expose which i think is pretty cool.  Purist cyanotypers may turn their noses up at this as i suppose its not really a true cyanotype but its quick and fun so i dont really care!

Flashy...

  As my new flash (a vivitar 285) had been sat in my bag unused for weeks i finally managed to get my wife to pose for some portriats for me.  This was my first venture with proper flash photography and it was highly enjoyable.  Mistakes were made though, i need to use my reflector better as most of the shots had a great big shadow off to one side.  But we learn through mistakes so it didnt bother me too much.  I like some of the shots that came out though:

  Portra is such a good film.  I hadn't used it for portraits before but the skin tones have come out great, ill be using it a lot more in future.  I had a fiddle in photoshop with one of the images, turning it into a cyanotype.  I can't decide whether i rpefer this or the original, what do you think?