I thought after yesterday’s test strips I was just about there as it seemed to me that 9 minutes was about right on the paper I had tested. Not so however as when I printed the actual image at 9 minutes it was very over exposed., I did another at 6 minutes with the same result. As I said in my last post, this lamp is more powerful than my old one, I hadn’t realised just how much.
I had two sheets of precoated cyanotypes left from a pack I had purchased last year to make cyanotypes with the year 6 children in our local school and thought I would try exposing those at 3 minutes to see what happened.
I’m not quite sure what had happened with the digital negative of the scabious flower, maybe it wasn’t inverted, but I got a better result then I’d had at 6 minutes so it did the job.
I then used the second sheet of paper to print the old crofthouse I had intended to make in the first place.
This was cheap paper which was already partly exposed at one end so while this print is not the quality I would be happy with, it does give me a starting point for tomorrow’s experiments which I will make on decent watercolour paper.
All is not entirely lost with the over exposed prints either though. I have bleached both and toned one with green tea. They are currently drying and tomorrow I intend to weave them along with the one above and see what results. More a question of reuse, recycle and reclaim again rather than following today’s hint with was ‘Try cheating today’.
Anne Bryson Photography 