Experiments in film soup - part 5

Hello, and welcome to part 5 of my occasional series where I share images altered by the film soup process.

These were taken on 35mm Kodak gold film, with a vintage Olympus OM10 camera.

After finishing the roll, I soaked the film canister in a solution of water with a bit of dish soap for 24 hrs., drained it, and let it dry out for several weeks. 

I then sent it off for special processing (don't use a regular lab, it will mess up their chemistry) and these are the results.

I'm still learning the ins and outs of this camera, so some of the images are not perfectly exposed, but I likes the eerie vibes of the above photo nonetheless.

All of these images are from various places along the Montour Trail, south of Pittsburgh PA.

I'm finding that in general, dish soap, which is a base, gives a very different vibe than lemon/lime juice, which is an acid. Of course there are a lot of variables inherent to the process, just like working with cyanotype, but learning to control for some of the variables is what makes these experiments so much fun.

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Experiments in wet cyanotype - part 98

Welcome to part 98 of my ongoing experiments with the wet cyanotype process. You can access them all, in reverse chronological order, by clicking the Wet Cyanotype tab in the header. 

In this post I continue my mini-obsession with red mulberry leaves. The red mulberry, Morus rubra, is the native tree here in the eastern US. The white mulberry, which I come across much more frequently, is an invasive that was introduced here to feed caterpillars for the silk industry. The two are now frequently cross-breeding, to the detriment of the reds; I don't know if the specimen I found is the pure variety or not. The leaves of the red are much larger than the white, and the shapes are wonderful for printing with.

I began this session with two large panels on cotton sateen, then added some single leaves on mineral paper. I mixed a bit of Solarfast solar dye with the cyanotype chemicals.

Here are the prints after a long exposure, and before rinse out.

The rusty brown tones on the mineral paper will be transformed when rinsing, it's a lot of fun to watch.

Here are the finished prints. I love the all the subtle patterning and color distribution on the cotton prints.

Lots of swirls and fun stuff on the mineral paper prints as well.

These are wildly unpredictable, so it's always a fun surprise to see the way they turn out. 

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