Over Thanksgiving, my Father-in-law was visiting us and said he would like an old Cyanotype portrait of himself. I was more than happy to oblige. After we had finished some family portraits and while the studio was still setup, I switched cameras to my 4×5 Speed Graphic and made 4 exposures of him. The first 2 exposures were made with just the modeling lights of the studio flashes at 1/60th of a second at f5.6; then the last 2 exposures, to gain more depth of field, I exposed at f16 for 1 second and manually triggered the studio strobes during the exposure.
After developing in sauce for 14 minutes and leaving overnight in the salt fixer, I had 4 wonderfully exposed images. Since in past times, I have had some moire problems in my scans, I decided to try a very rough wet mount to the scanner. Basically I shook the water off the negative so it would not drench the scanner bed and placed it on the surface. This method worked fairly well, though instead of moire circles in the scan, I ended up with some air bubbles. Though since I was aiming for an antique looking image as a final result, I didn’t mind the new artifacts.
The final image was one of the exposures made at f16 1″second with studio flash.
Until next time….
Ryan Hoover Photography 