Multi-Exposure Cyanotype Photographs

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Ben. I'm an artist and educator and welcome to this class how to make multiple exposures cyanotype photograph. In this class we're gonna be taking the fundamentals of how to make a cyanotype print and really pushing them a little bit farther to make sure we understand how time and exposure work together so that you can really be as creative as you want to be. Because why would you want to make a multiple exposure print? Well, there's a big difference between having multiple objects in a composition and exposing them all at the same time versus exposing one at a time and building up your exposure as you expose each layer. That's what we're gonna be doing in this class. Boiled down, this class is all about learning how to control exposure so that you can get the aesthetic that you desire. In this class, we're gonna be starting out with some small examples to just get your feet wet and make sure you're understanding how long your exposure really is and how the elements work together. And then we're gonna go to some larger examples to try to go bigger and see how this process scales up. There is of course, different aesthetics. You could go four different ways of layering things. And that's all going to be explored. And hopefully I'm gonna give you the foundation you need to then go and make your own prints to make your own explorations into using this method. My hope for you out of this class is really to help you think about cyanotype a little bit differently. The creative potential of cyanotype isn't limited to you just deciding whether to do a silhouette of some object or possibly and negative. But you can also mess with the variables of the process itself, of time and exposure. In the same way that maybe you've begun to think about toning as a part of the process that you can experiment with. I'm ready to jump right into this class and I'm really excited about the potential this is going to unlock for your future cyanotype prints. Let's go ahead and jump in. In the next video, we'll talk about the supplies you'll need for this class. I'll see you there. 2. Supplies: Hey there and welcome back to this class about making multiple exposure cyanotype. This video we're gonna talk about the supplies you will need. And the great thing is, there's really nothing outside of the normal supplies you would need in order to make a normal cyanotype. Let's just review some of the basics and then we'll jump right into making the project. Of course, cyanotype starts with all the materials you may need to sensitize the paper. So you need the two-part chemistry, the paper or the brush. I'm gonna skip over all that in this video, this video we're gonna assume you kind of understand that. We're going to skip past the coding stage to where you actually have some coated paper. I have some smaller sizes. Actually, I'm gonna try some at a larger size as well to see about the results we can get. You could also try this technique with some of the store-bought pre-coded cyanotype. There's no reason that wouldn't work either. Of course. In order to be printing, you're going to need some sort of contact frame. I would recommend just something relatively cheap and simple from the craft store. This is the one that I use. It's large enough to fit. I'm an 11 by 17 piece of paper, which is the largest size I can easily make a negative at home. So this works well for me. I always recommend making sure it's actually glass and plastic because a lot of the plastic has some UV filtering built-in, which will of course not work when we're trying to print with UV light. And the back. I like these because they're actual clips. You know, those little metal tabs that come on. A lot of cheap frames that go along the edge is they'll work for awhile, but eventually they'll break off. So I find a system like this actually works pretty well. Of course you can spend a lot more on getting a really nice contact printing frame. They work really, really well, but it's just more money than I wanted to invest in that at this time for the actual printing, once you have everything inside your frame, you have your two standard option. You can either take it outside and print in the sun. That works really well as long as it's relatively a clear day and you're at a time of the year when you're getting enough sun, or you can choose to use an indoor UV printer like the one I have a class dedicated to showing you how to build. I use mine all the time. It's really sort of revolutionized the way I go about making prints because I can do it anytime day or night and I'm no longer waiting on the Sun when the sun is seemed to be hiding. Today, I'm actually going to be using my indoor UV printer, which by way of reminder looks something like this. And I've got the UV lights inside here. We can see something like that. That is where I'm actually going to be making my print nice and controlled. Then last but not least, you're going to need your printing objects. What are you going to make? For this class we're gonna be focusing on sort of the traditional plant silhouette of cyanotype. So I have a nice stack of leaves of different sizes. And I've actually been pressing these underneath a stack of books that these are all relatively flat. Some of these are still wanting to Carl like a holly leaf. Maybe I won't use that one just because the flatter things are, the more crisp edges are going to be for the final print, the easier they are gonna be to deal with inside the frame. All of that's true, so get some nice flat leaves. And once we talk about the project, you might be convinced of specific kinds of leaves or sizes of leaves. It kind of depends on your creative intent. But I have sort of starting with some very large leaves like this one. Going to some thinner, thinner, dainty your leaves like this one. And kind of a range In-between of a bunch of different kinds. So that is something if you want to copy exactly what I'm doing here, you can go for something like that. Of course, I also have another option which I'm gonna be doing an example of which is using more branches. These are all evergreen style bushes of different kinds that are on my property. And so of course I'm not going to be using these whole branches, but I'm gonna be using parts of these. We're going to try to different styles of this technique. Some using branches, some using leaves, whichever those seems like it would work for you. Go ahead and use that, of course, anything that has an interesting silhouette of some kind that's relatively flat can be printed using the system. So sky's the limit for your creativity. That's everything we're gonna need. If you need a refresher on how to cope paper had a mixed chemistry, I recommend you go back to my cyanotype 101, one hundred two hundred three classes that really cover all the basics on how cyanotype works. The ones related to this class specifically would be cyanotype 102 especially. So that's all I have for the supplies video. In the next video, we're going to jump right into the actual process. So I'll see you there. 3. Small Print: Hey there and welcome back. In this video, we're going to actually go through a little bit of a how-to and a small-scale test before we jump into the final print. Because I want to make sure you really understand how this multiple exposure thing works. The big thing here is that we are using this opportunity in order to control exposure so that we can control our aesthetic. We want to change how the final image looks. And so we are changing the variable of how much time an object is being exposed for to change how much it shows in the final print. And I think if you've been making cyanotype for awhile, that might inherently makes sense, but you may have never put the 22 together that you can change what a full exposure is in order to make an image either less or more visible. So that's really what we're experimenting with. And if that just went over your head and you have no idea what I'm talking about. Well, then you can just follow along step-by-step and I think it'll start to make sense. So before we again, let me just show you again this example. This was just something that I was making to make sure my printer was working correctly because I just dug it out of storage and chemistry was all operating. So I just made a quick sample to make sure I wasn't crazy and here's what we got. So looking at that, this certainly isn't an amazing print, but you can see if you look very closely at the details that I have actually three leaves there that I've overlapped and I exposed each of them for only part of what a full exposure would be. In my case, I have a roughly 16 minute exposure. I actually was guesstimating a little higher when I was making this. So I was thinking more like 18 minutes. So for each leaf, I only kept each leaf on there for six minutes because I had three leaves. I was guessing about an 18 minute exposure. So you have the full exposure divided by the number of exposures. And that gives you what the length each exposure should be. In that case, six minutes. That's basically what we're gonna be doing in this kind of test print. We're just going to start with a few layers. I would recommend two or three different objects. Then you're going to divide that, divide the full length of your exposure, whatever that is for your given scenario by that number of objects. Now, here's some things to consider though. When you're looking at this, you don't immediately notice the faint outlines of these other leaves. They're there. They're in very dark blue, but there's definitely there when I look at it closely. But what you first notice is the white shape that was completely covered by every leaf. And the contrast between that bright white and the dark blue makes it so that, that is really what you look at first. And actually it's funny. This one almost looks sort of like a bat symbol, which is not what I was intending to do, but that's certainly what it looks like. So how do you change that? How do you change the contrast? Well, what I'm going to try to do in this little sample, and you'll get to see what the results are. Is that instead of saying, well, I'm going to be doing three leaves. And so I'm going to divide the full amount of exposure by three. I'm going to do one partial exposure with nothing on there, so that the white will turn to a very faint blue and then divide the rest by the full amount of exposure. In my case, I'm guessing from my experiments, this is about a 16 minute exposure. So I'm going to do a one-minute kind of blank exposure with nothing on there. And then do three, five-minute exposures, each with a different leaf overlapped. Hopefully that's sort of starting to make sense to you that exposure can be additive. So as long as this outside area that's all nice and blue gets exposed a total of 16 minutes. In my case, it's going to turn that dark blue. It doesn't matter if it's broken up. 16 one-minute exposures to eight minute exposures or any variable in between there, as long as it's a total of 16 minutes, it'll turn that dark blue because it's been exposed that long. You can use that to your creative advantage. And this sort of begs the question, of course, which is how do you know exactly what your exposure is? And that comes back to the classic test strip. So what I'm going to recommend before you begin anything is to pause this video or once you get to the end of it, stop and first make a test strip it, even if you think you kind of have that dialed in, I just recommend it's always a good idea to do every once in awhile to make sure you're not miscalculating the amount of time it takes to expose. In fact, with this very box, I was making a mistake before that, making a test strip fixed in my case. So go ahead and make a test strip. And if you don't remember what a test strip is, you're simply going to get a small piece of sensitized paper with the cyanotype solution on it. You're going to put it inside your frame. You don't need anything on it. And then as you go, you're gonna get a piece of cardboard and you're just going to move the cardboard along every few minutes. Now if you think you're on the longer side of exposure, maybe you do every five-minutes. And so this first section will be five minutes and then you'd move it and you expose again in five minutes. And then you'd move it again and you expose five-minutes and you've exposed five minutes and you'd keep going until you run out of paper. Basically, remember exposure is additive. So that first section would be five minutes times the number of times you move the paper. So maybe that would end up being a 25-minute exposure on this end and a five-minute exposure on this end. And there would be a gradient going all the way across with lines. So you could say here's 252015 and so on. That's maybe if you have a bit of a longer exposure time, if you think you have a shorter exposure time, Let's say you're at noon and the summer, maybe you do every two minutes, but you do the same process. You do two minutes, move it two minutes, move it two minutes, move it two minutes, and you just go across and that's going to allow you to dial in. This is exactly where the proper full exposure will be. So you want to dial that in my case, again, I'm dialing that in at about 16 minutes. I might go a little longer, it might go a little shorter. Just to make my math easier so that I can do whole minute exposures, but it's relatively close to that. That's the first step. You have to know what your exposure is, your full exposure. Now, we're going to start building our actual print. I recommend working relatively small if you want to work, this is about a five by seven. You could go about this size just to give you a sense of how this final process will work. Before we go larger, before I go full-scale. Just like always, I start by putting my frame down, open it up. Was like to try to blow a little dust off. There's a few little smudges on here, but I'm not worried about that for the test, I'll probably clean it off for the final print. And then I just want to start with a leaf going to go ahead and grab one like this. Again, put this face down because the light is going to be coming the other way. And some of this is a little bit of Eyeball work. You just try to line it up as best as you can. Going to put this on. If you're worried about things getting lined up, It's a good idea just to kinda like sandwich this together, lift it up, and then look and see, is this lined up the way you want to in my case? Yeah, I kinda like how this is lined up. It's not perfectly centered, but it feels pretty good. Then I'll just flip this over. Lock it down. Now this is ready. I'm gonna go ahead and put it in the bin. Move this to the side. That right in the center. Now I just need to plug this in. Now I have my two chords. They're not plugged in yet. I'm setting my timer for five minutes again because I'm planning to do three leaves overlap. So 316 minute exposure divided by three, close enough to five minutes. And then I'm actually going to do a one-minute with nothing on there so that the white isn't actually white. It's gonna be a light-blue. Set my timer for five minutes. Then I'm going to go ahead and plug my lights in. One to start the timer. Then I just wait. Go ahead, take this out. Take out the original leaf, put in a new leaf. Line it up exactly the way I want. Like so lay it down. Then. Put this back on. Probably verify that things are lined up the way I want, which they are. Pop this back on. For another five minutes. That's getting exposed. Now we're onto our last leaf. In this case. It looks like that we've shifted a little bit, but that'll be fine for our test. Then last, I'm gonna go ahead and do this smaller one inside is something like that. The thing is that wherever you want it. In this case, yes. I'm going to drop this down. Ready for one more five-minute exposure. We now have our exposed print for a total of 15 minutes. That means anywhere that hasn't had anything overlapping, it has a 15-minute exposure. So the blue areas, the outside edges should be nice and dark blue. But as it's been covered up more and more, it would have less and less of an exposure. The area that's been overlapped by all three leaves would be completely white. Now if you want that like this example I showed you the area to be completely white in the center. Well then you'd be done at this step. You can take this and develop it. But I'm gonna try to just give it like a one-minute exposure is something just to knock off the edge of the white. It's a very pale blue, maybe even less than a minute. And that way it's not quite the stark contrast that here I find a little bit distracting. Now, I have a different combination of leaves here, so it would be a different shape. So it's possible this would end up fine. So really, this is where your opinion and your aesthetic start to come into play. I'm gonna try wondering minute exposure and see what that does to our final result. That was a one-minute exposure. And now I'm going to go developed this. Again. I'm just going to be developing in standard tap water. No need to get fancy with anything here. And I'll be back in a few minutes and show you what this result produced. So that then we can move on to our final full-scale prints, which might be a little bit more complicated and hopefully a little more fun. I'll be back in just a minute. All right, I am fresh back from developing and using C, this is still wet, but I did use, I use hydrogen peroxide to fully oxidize this. So it should have the final colors here. And you can see, turned out pretty well, the colors are good to my exposure, I know is good. Now though white at the center is still almost a 100% white. Maybe the faintest blue to it, which just tells me I was being a little too dainty with saying, Oh, I only want a one-minute exposure there, which would make it just slightly blue. So if I am planning to have that be light blue, I need to plan a blank exposure as the same amount of exposure as all the other leaves. That's what I'm going to plan on doing, which means I just have to change my math a little bit, but it's still the same method. Basically, instead of dividing the full meant by three, I'm going to just divide the full amount by four, which means it will reduce each leaves exposure. I feel like I learned a lot from doing this using this exact setup with those leaves. Of course, my results may vary from yours. If you've got results that didn't work for you, well, I'd recommend just giving it another try. Maybe choose a different subjects, right? One where the line, the way the lines line up from one layer to the next are going to change the aesthetic, the look of your final print. So maybe just changing those. We'll be able to change things up enough so that you can get results you like. If something with your exposure isn't quite right, then I always recommend going back and just trying to do a test strip again to make sure you've really dialed in your exact exposure. I'm relatively happy with the amount of the tones in here. The first leaf I did, it's very faint, but it's also definitely there when you're looking at it close. So I like that ghostly effect. And I'm excited to see how this is going to play out in the final print. In the next video, we're gonna go full-scale with this with a larger piece of cyanotype with more layers. And we're going to go full-scale with this thing. So we'll see you there. 4. Large Print Method 1: Okay, welcome back. In this video we're gonna go full-scale with our multi exposure leaf overlapping print. And again, hopefully at this point you're getting the idea that this certainly is not the only application for multiple exposure. I think you could use a lot of different methods, even within overlapping leaves instead of overlapping them just one on top of the other. You could overlap just the edges and spread them out. You'd get almost like a test strip, but using the leaves as the thing you're covering them. There's lots of interesting possibilities here, but if you're following along with me, Let's go through this step-by-step. I have an approximately 15 minute exposure plus or minus a minute. I think we're gonna be fine. I went to divide that by the number of layers I have. I have my leaves right here. And I actually have here five layers of leaves. However, if you remember, I'm trying to make it so the the area that's covered by everything, that area that would be white is not white. In my last video, I did a one-minute blank exposure, and that wasn't enough. In this case, this would be close to a two minute exposure or maybe three. I don't know if that's enough. So I'm actually going to act as if the blank layers are two more layers. So that means if I have five leaves plus two more layers, I have a total of seven layers I'm exposing, which makes for about a two minute exposure each. I think that's something that one it's relatively easy to keep track of, and it's still not so many that it becomes confusing is what layer I'm on and all that. So I'm going to go ahead and try that. 72 minute exposures, five of them with leaves and two of them just plain so that the white level gets brought up to a level of blue that I like better. Again, your mileage may vary. If your exposure is longer, you need to have a different number you're dividing by dividing from. If you have a different number of objects or leaves, then you need to have a different dividing the exposure by a different number of items. All that is sort of the basic math aspect of this that hopefully you're able to apply to your situation. Enough of that in and start printing. And I'm going to work from the largest to the smallest. And I'm starting with the big guy. And I'm pretty much going to try to put these near the center. Now of course, I'm going to be doing this upside down. I'm putting this near the center. Putting my paper the center. Once again, we can go ahead and just look at it. Is that place where I want it? It looks like actually I need to go over that way a little bit more. Pop this up, this up. Just slide this over a bit. So I'm a bit more centered. The level of precision you're going for here is as always, a 100% up to you. I like to let the process kinda speak for itself. So I don't like to try to be absolutely perfect. I just like to be perfect enough. Lock this in. We're set for a two-minute exposure. This actually isn't a perfect coding by me. I kinda Actually, I was doing this very quickly and I made a little mistake. But again, to me, that's part of the process. I'm not that worried about a little imperfection here and there. I think it's going to make for a nice print overall. So I'm gonna go ahead and go for it. Two minutes on the clock. I will go ahead and start. One layer down more to go. See. Very light exposure has gone. See, suppose you're building up. I like how that's lining up. Lock it in. Hopefully you're getting the idea that certainly this could all be done outside. But it doesn't make life a lot easier doing this inside a controlled leg environment, I can just turn the UV light off instead of having to go find some shade or bring it inside and outside each time. Again, check it lined up. This is where again, I can be making adjustments. I think I wanted to move this up a little bit more. Yeah, that's more of what I want. Now we've done all of our leaves. I was five leaves, two minutes each, which means we have a ten minute exposure. But for this setup, I need about a 14 to 16 minute exposure in order to make that center part of the frame that has been covered by a leaf the entire time. Turn it into blue instead of just pure white. I'm gonna do a four minute exposure, which would bring the entire exposure up to 14 minutes. Now that means the ones that were only two minutes are going to be pretty light. But I think we're gonna have that faint in detail in the shadows while still having some of this bluer tone in the center. No leaf in there, just exposing it for four more minutes to darken the overall level of blue in this print, and then we'll be ready to develop. We have our complete exposure. Now I'll have to do is take it n development. We're going to actually look at this finished print in the final video with our analysis of the prints we did and what we would repeat, what would we do differently the next time we use this process? I'll see you in the next video where we're going to follow a similar process, but use a different method for how we are overlapping. The subject, I'll see you there. 5. Large Print Method 2: All right, Welcome back. This is our second version of this multi exposure cyanotype print. And we're all set up to try a little bit of a different method. And the main thing about this one, we're still going to be going larger format. So I have a larger cyanotype. But rather than just a layering one object on top of another, we're going to change the composition a bit so that we're kind of leading in from all four corners. And that way I'm hoping that not everything will be turning white at the center. And so we'll be getting just some more interesting shape and pattern with the way we overlap things. So it'll be a little bit chaotic, but I'm going to just hope for the best and go for it. Now in terms of exposure, I'm pretty happy with where I'm getting with the 14 to 15 minute exposure. So if we have four objects and a 14 to 15 minute exposure, that divided by four means that we have about a 3.5 minute exposure, give or take, plus or minus 30 seconds isn't going to make it that big of a deal in the final print, since each one only makes up a little bit at a time. Now, again, this is a variable you can play with because you know that if you're only adding up to the total amount of time, only the areas where they're all overlapping will be totally white. And each individual plant or it's not overlapping, will only be one-quarter of the exposure. That means it's gonna be fairly faint. So you could experiment with, say, maybe do each one as a half of the exposure. You're still going to get the overlapping effect where they're overlapped, they're probably still going to be pretty white as long as you have fairly opaque objects. But the areas where it's by itself will be half the exposure instead of only a quarter. So that will make a big difference in terms of the darkness, the contrast between the object and the background. In my case, rather than doing for 3.5 minute exposures, maybe I would just do 47 minute exposures. That would, that would drastically change the look of the print. But for the sake of simplicity, I'm gonna keep it simple and just divide the total exposure by the number of objects. So that means a 3.5 minute exposure for me, you of course, can feel free to do what you want. Now in order to get this print to do what I want, I'm thinking of I have these, it sort of evergreen shrub branches that I gathered from a yard and I'm going to need to prune these down, I think so that there's not too much going on. I think a little bit more sparse will be better. So I'm gonna just go ahead and cut this. And that's getting better. I'm gonna cut off Maybe. I think I'm pretty happy with that. Remember when you're dealing with plants that every little bit of dirt and dust that falls up here is going to end up in the final print so you can be as dirty or clean as you want. I'm going to try to line this up just like this. It's gonna be difficult to get it perfect, but I'll do my desk there. This up there. I'm gonna make sure I get my branch all the way off the edge so it really feels like it's bleeding in something like that. Good. Before I do all of them, just take a look. I'm reasonably happy with that composition, so I'm gonna just go for it. 3.5 minutes, starting now. Starting to expose. You can see what's happening there. Now I just need to start balancing this out a little. Go ahead with one of these stringy, longer ones. Needed. Cut quite a bit off of this though. Just start kinda lining it up, please. What am I gonna do here? Thanks. Something like that is going to work for what I want. Clean off your French. Clean off the glass. You really need to, like some cases with these thicker things to really smash this down as much as possible. There we go. I was able to get it. Again, just double-check. This is how I want it. I'm happy with that. Pop it in another 3.5 minutes. Getting some nice exposure there. You can see, which is MIT exposure now. But you can see where there's the lighter areas those have been where things have overlapped more than once. So I want to make sure if possible that I can continue that. One little stringy ear, but I like it. I'm gonna go something along those lines. I'm going to go like that. Really going to have to sandwich this down again and check on it. That's gonna be pretty cool. I'm still overlapping some of those lighter areas, which means it's gonna get very light. I'm pretty happy with it. My last corner, this one up here, I believe, getting a kind of hard to see, I should have made better notes of that. But this is the one I'm going to go with, but I need to seriously thin this out. Something just to make sure it's where I want it. I think that's looking pretty good. Where it's at. There we have it, our fully exposed print. Really only developing it is going to show us what we have the way we've done it. And so I'm gonna go do that now in our next video, we're going to take a look at this finished print, the other finished print, our experimental prints and then see, what did we really love about this process? What might we change the next time and talk about some other creative potential that this multi exposure method gives us. See you in the next video. 6. Final Analysis: Hi there and welcome back to this final video where we're gonna be talking about the analysis of all the prints we've made and really dive into what we liked, what we didn't like, what we would do differently. And probably more specifically focus on the creative potential that this process opens up. The first print I showed you is this. This was a test I did when I was just making sure my chemistry was working right and that my printing box was all in working order because I just pulled it out of storage. So I made this print and it's a multiple exposure with three leaves. And if you see it closely, you can see those three leaves in there. There's parts of the sprint that are beautiful parts of it that I'm not a huge fan of. Something about. It looks like the bat symbol to me when viewed from the side, which that was not my intent. What this print highlighted to me and it's something that we're thinking through, through this whole class is how much do we want that really strong white to dark blue contrast in the print? Or do we want there to be more of a subtle transition from one to the next. And if that's the case.