Friday, March 25, 2011

Sunprint from Glass Negative

A few years ago I bought a box of glass negatives at the Stormville flea market.  The seller didn't know much about them, except that he had gotten them from an old doctor's house, and he thought they were made in the late 1800s.  The negatives are about 4 inches square.  Some are askew -- the doctor wasn't a professional -- but I was thrilled with them. One of my favorites is this barn image.
For this image,  I laid the glass negative on a sunprint, which is basically a cheap cyanotype.  Sunprints are sold in packages, usually for kids. You place something on top of the print and put it in the sun until you think you have the right exposure (depends on the strength of the sun, the opacity of what you put on the plate, etc).  The glass negative is thick so it took a while, and I had to make several prints to get the right exposure.  Then you rinse the paper in water, and voila, a blue sunprint. I scanned the sunprint on my scanner and changed the color to a moodier blue.  If you don't care to make a sunprint, you can scan the negative on a flatbed scanner, and bring it into Photoshop and play.

This image -- like all the others on my blog, on my website, www.maryannglass.com and at my gallery, www.riverwindsgallery.com -- is for sale at various sizes.  Please contact me if you are interested.

Join our photo tour this September in Tuscany and Sorrento and learn some new techniques for your photography.  For more information, check out my website www.maryannglass.com or www.arthistoryalive.com.

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