Earlier in June we organized a cyanotype workshop in connection with White Nights artists residency with some amazing results. Now the summery days with experimentations continue. I have a few boxes of glass negatives of unknown origin and I’m about to start scanning them soon. Yesterday, with all this midsummer sun, I made the first cyanotypes with three of them, ahead of the scanning process. The glass plates appear to be tricky because the density of exposure in them varies and consequently it is not easy to estimate the exposure time in the sun. The paper texture doesn’t seem ideal either, so these first samples are underexposed. But that’s ok, more attepts will follow. I soaked two of them in an oak gall bath so that their tone changed lightly. The oak gall is great stuff because it gives cyanotypes a “charcoal” look that I really like.
A whole other chapter will be to find out where these photos were taken, by whom and who are the people in the photographs.
Jarmo Pikkujämsä 
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