The light sensitive paper arrived Saturday morning and seeing as the weather was suitably obliging, fabulously sunny day, I was able to play with it straight away. To start with I tried using some glass negatives to make contact prints. I popped the paper in a film changing bag to protect it from light, cut a piece of foam to place the paper on (instructions said use corrugated card but I didn’t have any!) and filled a bowl of water to use as a ‘development’ tank. The instructions suggested a two minute exposure but the sun was so strong the paper was bleached white in only twenty seconds! I tweaked to accommodate this and then placed the paper in the water for one minute to wash off the chemicals. The whole process was very quick and simple and I was really amazed by the level of detail in the results. The low contrast in one of the images produced less satisfactory results but this wasn’t a complete surprise – had similar results when using these to make contact prints in the darkroom. This is certainly something I’ll need to consider if I want to make my own negatives. I then picked some grasses to lay on the paper, placed a piece of Perspex over the top to hold everything still and exposed this to the sun. Rather liked this effect as well. The main issues I have with this process are the limitations imposed by the size of the paper – am not sure what I can do with an image at A5! On a grander scale I think this method would have enormous potential but this would mean buying and mixing my own chemicals then painting them onto the surface of large sheets of fabric or paper. Not totally averse to the idea but really don’t have the time to do that at the moment and would probably be quite expensive.
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