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

Hang It Yourself at PhotoAccess

© Andrée Lawrey

Some Polaroids from my last visit to a favourite holiday location on the South Coast of New South Wales – more holiday dreaming... The originals are quite soft, so the prints had to be small; I used a textured paper to emphasise their soft, almost painterly quality.

This completes my 2010 group exhibition marathon! Always a fun show, this year's Hang it Yourself at PhotoAccess should be the best yet. It opens on Sunday, 5 September at 12 noon and continues until 19 September. Further details are available here.

Polaroid 600 Spirit

Don't Blame the Equipment!

© Andrée Lawrey

Unsharp photos, the bane of my life – except when I'm playing around with plastic cameras and other 'creative blur' approaches. Soft and moody has its own charm, but I'm trying to remember that even famously unsharp Holga, Diana and Polaroid cameras give better results with a bit of care and application on my part – and the solution for my DSLR is not necessarily a shiny new lens!

My latest Different Strokes article is available here, in the August 2010 edition of Capital Image (page 12).

Polaroid 600 Spirit