Alternative Printing

Every summer here at Beau, Kathy, our resident alternative process expert, leads a series of workshops on various forms of photography and printing. Last year I helped her out with the cyanotype workshop, and this year with lumen printing. I had really been wanting to try out some of these methods on my own, so last month I met up with a couple friends in Squamish and we got experimenting.

I packed up the car with everything we needed, expired darkroom paper for lumen prints, pre printed transparencies, glass frames, and the Flic Film cyanotype kit, and headed out.

We started out by mixing up a batch of the cyanotype chemicals, the bottles in the Flic Film make it quite easy since they have the measurements on them. Cyanotype printing is done by mixing two chemicals, Potassium Ferricyanide (part A) and Ferric Ammonium Citrate (part B) to create a light sensitive solution. First you dissolve each chemical in water, and then mix equal parts of part A and part B together. It is best to do this in a low light environment since the solution becomes light sensitive as soon as the two parts are mixed together. With that solution made we then brushed a thin layer onto the watercolour paper included in the kit and left it in a dark room to dry.

Once the paper was completely dry we took it outside, put our transparencies on the painted side of the paper, pressed it in the glass frame, and placed it in the sun. I had pre-printed negatives of the images we had all chosen on the Flic Film Inkjet Transparencies at the printing station here at Beau. How long you leave your cyanotype in the light depends on a few factors. Mainly being how much sun there is, a bright day with full sun will require about five to thirty minutes where an overcast day could take hours. The longer you leave it in the sun the darker the blue shadows will become, so part of the timing is your preference on how much contrast you would like.

Since this was a day with a lot of sun we generally left the prints out for an average of 15 minutes depending on the amount of contrast we wanted. After there was a noticeable darkening of the print and we felt like they were done (this can just take some trial and error to figure out), we took them inside and rinsed them under water until it ran clear. This was my favourite part of the process because it is where you see your print really come to life. The cyanotype chemicals are a yellow/green colour when they haven’t been exposed to light and a deep cyan blue (hence the name) when they have. Rinsing the prints under water washes away all the unexposed yellow solution and reveals the cyan blue shadows and bright highlights. In our case the highlights were white because we used white paper, but the highlights will just be an absence of blue so it will show whatever material is underneath.

For the second part of the day we wanted to experiment with a different medium, lumen printing. While cyanotype is not a difficult process to do, lumen printing requires even fewer steps. You really only need three things, black and white darkroom paper (expired is usually better), something to expose onto the paper, and glass to press the object flat on the paper.

I had collected up a few different kinds of darkroom papers to test out because different manufacturers use different chemicals, which leads to different colours showing up in the lumen printing process. We also went around the garden of the house we were at in Squamish and collected some different flowers to try for our exposures. Once we had those materials the process was quite simple, arrange the flowers on the paper how we like, press them in the glass frames, and place in the sun. While you don’t need to arrange the flowers on the darkroom paper in complete darkness, it is best to do it in the shade since the colour changing process happens quite quickly once in full sun.

Similar to cyanotype, the length of time you leave the darkroom paper in the sun will change the amount of contrast you get in your final image. Generally lumen prints can stay in the sun quite a bit longer than cyanotypes, some people even leave them for days. On this day we got our desired results leaving them in the sun for about 20 minutes since we wanted to still have a good amount of definition in the highlights and get a range of colours.

Lumen prints inherently will not have that much contrast, so when you see scans of them online they are usually edited. It is pretty easy to adjust the contrast and saturation and really bring out the image, like what I did in Lightroom on the ones above. Below is an example of an unedited scan on the left and then an enhanced version on the right. You can tell how it doesn’t take much to get quite a bit of detail and colour out of the print.

For lumen prints to look like the ones from this post, they cannot be put through the developing and fixing process that you would normally do when making a darkroom print. Because the entire sheet has been exposed to light, if it was developed you would get an entirely black sheet of paper. It doesn’t mean that your image will go away immediately in the light, but it will eventually, and in the meantime the colours will slowly change. The only way to preserve those same colours is to scan or photograph the print while it looks how you like. You can also skip the developing step and just use fixer on the paper, it will stop it from changing in the light but it will also change the colours quite a bit. I personally prefer the look of the prints without any fixer so I chose to scan them and then store them in a dark bag.

While I do somewhat understand how the process of lumen printing works, I am far from an expert and probably not the best one to explain what is happening on the chemistry side. I found this blog post while doing research and thought it explained it better than I can (but I haven’t gone and fact checked the whole thing so maybe take it with a grain of salt).

If you are interested in seeing some more cyanotype and lumen prints, we have a show coming up October 7th at the Beau Gallery to showcase work from people who participated in our summer workshops!