Smartphones and Cyanotypes

Cyanotype Still Life © Andrée Lawrey

Everything old is new again:  my latest Different Strokes article looks at a hi-tech, digital incarnation of plastic camera photography and the fun of making cyanotypes.  You can find it here, in the October 2010 edition of Capital Image (page 18).

Polaroid Chairs Diptych

 © Andrée Lawrey

My first cyanotypes!  Special thanks to my photographer friends Lorna, Susan H and Marlene for giving me such a fun and inspiring introduction to cyanotype printing.

The original image is a Polaroid 600 photo which I scanned to make negatives for contact printing.  I often fall in love with negative images, so I tried printing this one both ways.  The positive print works best – the darker background is less distracting – but I also like the pair as a diptych.  (Thanks for the suggestion, Lorna!)

Spring Blossom

© Andrée Lawrey

It's too easy to overlook the photo opportunity just outside the front door.  Quite literally, in this case – every Spring I mean to photograph the blossoming crab apple trees lining the path by my front door, walking by day after day, thinking "I must come down with the macro lens and see what I can make of this", then letting the days slip by until the opportunity is lost for another year.

Then, at a portraiture class on Sunday afternoon, I found myself shamefully out of practice with spot metering and manual exposure settings.  I drove home determined to refresh my manual photography skills at the first opportunity.  And there were the flowering crab apples...

I was thinking of Chinese flower paintings and watercolours on heavy, absorbent paper.  And Spring, of course.

D700, 105 f/2.8 micro