first success with the pinhole & thoughts on where to go with cyanotypes

A few months ago, I got to take a workshop at Sawtooth with Lou Krueger in which we assembled our own 4x5 pinhole cameras. It was incredible, and Lou had done all of the really hard work for us, so that when we showed up to the class, all the parts were measured and cut, and we got to do the assembling. Then we experimented with making exposures using photo paper, as opposed to film - which really speeds up the process, it seems.

I finally bought my own 4x5 film holder and have been experimenting just two exposures at a time. My first 2 exposures didn’t turn out — and embarrassingly, this could have been because I accidentally put the paper in the stop bath first! Working with film and in the darkroom is truly humbling and forces me to
~s l o w d o w n~ in order to avoid silly mistakes like this. But today! Today I developed the next two exposures I made this week, and they turned out! I think they were a tad overexposed at 1 min 45 sec and 2 min, respectively. I edited these a bit in photoshop, and am generally happy with them.

I have been growing my leg hair out for a while, and am working on collaborating with other women in a photo/essay project on the subject of body hair. So, maybe you can or can’t tell that my legs are “fuzzy” as one of my favorite little 5 yr old friends likes to say, but they are. More thoughts on this later—

Saturday I was inspired to make cyanotypes using the early spring bulbs and branches that are blooming around the neighborhood. Overall, I figured out that I’d like to work on making my cyanotypes less one dimensional. There is real beauty in simplicity, and I think this process just works best with more delicate subjects, which is why I think I love the print of the branch of cherry blossoms best. So, my intentions moving forward are to play with moving objects around during the exposure time, and to brave adding layers on top, and really search for those delicate, see-through things that create the ghost-y layers of baby blue and white that bring more depth and make cyanotypes more magic (to me). I am also continuously drawn to trying the cyanotype process on colored paper too, but there is more to figure out there, too, I think.