[alt-photo] Re: further cyanotype observations

[Christina Anderson]

Hi Loris,

TImed the drying time to be consistent in a room made to 30% rH with a humidifier--no small feat in MT. Drying time 25 minutes. I think as much as papers retaining different amounts of moisture is how papers differentially absorb and hold the chemistry so it doesn't bleed or wash off. Actually, masa, a very absorbent paper though, bleeds.

I have not run the test with bone dry paper because I started with the above and therefore remained consistent.

All scanned together at same time, after drying 24 hr to oxidize (wish that same turquoise color would stay when it first comes out of the wash).

I would say that Crane's Cover, Masa, and Buxton are the most smooth and beautiful tonally. Even though the dmax may be a bit deeper in one than the other, I think the color is more important to me. I did test FAEW yesterday and it was the usual navy blue/greyish, only a 10 minute exposure time 1A:1B, and works fine enough for gumover purposes of course.

I am more noticing the grain in some of the highlights of some of the papers. Again, the three papers above are best in the grain department, too.

But I don't usually do cyanotype by itself, but either in concert with platinum or gum. With platinum I would definitely choose Platine, and with gum FAEW. Platine would be triple the cost for me if doing tricolor gum on it as opposed to on FAEW. Plus the cyano layer in my tricolors doesn't really function as much more than a base pale layer on which I put a layer of thalo blue as my last layer anyway over the yellow and magenta. I find a cyano layer done too deeply under a tricolor can dominate in a way I don't prefer, so pale is good! And I like to print Cyan-yellow-magenta-thalo and would prefer printing yellow first if I could see it well enough with my method of eyeball registration.

Off to work even though chatting about alt is much more fun :)
Chris

Christina Z. Anderson
christinaZanderson.com

On Feb 27, 2012, at 8:06 AM, Loris Medici wrote:

> Thanks for sharing Christina! Very interesting...
> 
> 1. Did you expose bone dry paper or timed the drying time? (If the
> latter, different papers will hold different amnt. of moisture,
> therefore their speed will vary considerably even if all the
> environmental / workflow parameters were kept constant...)
> 2. Which one was the best in the tonality department? (Masa looks like
> the nicest here...)
> 3. Which one was had the best in dmax? (BFK looks like being the
> nicest here - but only so if they were scanned all together; scanning
> exposure may vary considerably between the scans...)
> 
> Peter's suggestion about the chemical properties (alkalinity /
> acidity) of the paper are spot on BTW, that's another very important
> aspect about the speed of the paper...
> 
> Thanks again & regards,
> Loris.
> 
> 
> 26 Şubat 2012 17:33 tarihinde Christina Anderson <zphoto at montana.net> yazdı:
>> Dear All,
>> 
>> I have posted a visual at the URL below which shows the different paper "speeds" with traditional cyanotype.
>> ...
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