After a few weeks of getting used to the School's darkroom, we moved onto cyanotype processing pictures for our first major project, which I of course will be detailing in this blog post.
I personally love how cyanotype images look, they have a unique, vintage look that cannot be replicated with anything else. It reminded me of antique pictures I saw, which sparked my interest as a historian, while surprising me with how photography used to be done. The blue tint of Cyanotype pictures gives some photos a strange beauty, looking otherworldly and sometimes intentionally hard to recognize, it all helps give it that vintage feel I mentioned before. Cyanotypes are a weird way to
process pictures, but not too different from current methods such as using a dark room, which is very similar in practice but creates more advanced results.
This first picture was a test, collaging multiple images I had done before using miscellaneous objects found in the room. The photo turned out okay, in my opinion, but obviously could do with improvement - Firstly the images fell from their position, due to improper usage of the tape we were supposed to use to put them down: another issue is the collage itself. In retrospective I think it would have been better to them individually, even if it would have taken some time.
After this I created the images down below with some issues. The first was created by splashing the cyanotype image over a regular image, which was a photo of a gas mask, and let it process. The second and third photo were made using different methods, one of which was clearly more refined.
I liked the look of the first image, even thought I will admit it is hard to recognize the subject in the frame. For the others I am happy with how the second turned out, but I am still unsure what happened during the first attempt, maybe it was due to me confusing the order but now I will probably never know. From all these experiments I have learnt that images should be isolated, not collaged, remembered the proper order and let myself discover new methods of creating or refining how images look.
After this we were instructed to create Cyanotypes digitally using photoshop. This was done to see the comparison between the two methods. I decided to try and photoshop the images I used before, to compare them directly in a certain way.
I was impressed with how accurate you could make these images, however I believe they cannot compare to doing it manually. No matter how much I edited them, in my opinion they felt like an inferior and cheap way to do Cyanotype images. While it was interesting if I had to do it again, I would probably be using the chemicals and the dark room to make them instead of any digital process.
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