This month Effie and I are going to show her classmates how to make a cyanotype snow crystal. This is our first test of the process. She did well!
New 20×24″ Contact Printing Frame
With the help of my Christopher, my dad and my uncle Mark I now have a contact printing frame for making up to 16×20″ prints! 🙂 The largest prints I have been able to make up to this point is 9×12″.
There’s a little more work to be done, but I’m about to take it for a whirl anyway.
Cyanotype Snow Crystal Adventure!
Winter is a tough season for a warm weather loving portrait photographer.
Usually, it is when I plan for the next summer’s photographic and horticultural projects, and when I tackle at least one transformative house project.
These things will still happen, but at the moment I am fully immersed in learning about snow crystals and how the Victorian obsession with studying their structure intersected with early photographic processes decades before the first camera based micrographic image of a snow crystal was made.
This adventure started when I stumbled upon an online exhibition, written and curated by Caroline Marten, on the University of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum website that features, in part, examples of 19th century salted paper prints of hand drawn snow crystal illustrations by James and Cecilia Glaisher.
They are beautiful and I knew immediately that I would wanted to try to replicate the Glaisher’s process. It’s a new project, so I am still searching for a way to make it my own. But in the meantime, here is my first technical test using a reproduction of a Glaisher illustration included in the online exhibition.
