Camera-less photography

cameraless photography

In today's session we tried Cyanotypes, Gum Bicromate and Lumen's which are all forms of camera-less photography.  The two above are a Lumen, the left unedited and the right edited. To create this Lumen I collected leaves and flowers that I thought would work well when light shone through them. Next I placed them all on a piece of photographic paper and went and placed them in the sun for 30 minutes and then 10 more minutes as the sun had gone in. After leaving them for this amount of time the leaves and flowers had left their mark on the paper. All that was left to do was to scan the photo in. I think the lumen print worked really well, mainly because I used a variety of different leaves and I like how you can see the different details of each leave imprinted onto the paper.

Cyanotypes are like photograms using the sun as the enlarger and in this case and a digital negative as the print. The Cyanotype is achieved by applying a chemical to paper or in our case a piece of canvas and then putting objects or negatives atop and leaving them to expose in the sunlight. we left the Cyanotypes in direct sunlight for 8 minutes and then took them inside and washed off the access chemicals. I do like the outcome of this Cyanotype but if I was going to this technique again I would use a photograph that is less silhouette like as this photograph is.

Gum Bichromate is a lot like Cyanotypes. You apply a chemical to paper and then leave it to dry for 5 minutes in the dark. After that you take the paper outside and place objects on top of the paper and then leave in the sun for 15 minutes. Again like the cyanotype I used a digital negative to make the print. After the 15 minutes I took the print back inside and washed off the chemicals so the print was more visible. Looking back on this image I think if I had left my print outside for another 10 minutes the image would have been a lot more clearer, although I still believe this is a good first attempt at Gum Bichromate printing.