An extensive guide to Cyanotype Photography

I made my first Cyanotype paper prints during a photography workshop. Later on, as I wanted to print my design on shirts and bags, I decided to create a Cyanotype lab at home. In this post, I will go through the researches and the steps I did to produce prints.

The origins of Cyanotype

Cyanography is the practice of a photographic printing process called Cyanotype (in Greek Kyanos for blue), producing a distinctive Prussian blueprint. Discovered in 1842, by Sir John Herschel, it is the third technique ever created to obtain a stable photograph (after the daguerreotype and the calotype).

There are two main applications with Cyanotype:

• Negative photography: By printing a negative photograph on transparent paper, it is possible to obtain a positive cyanotype print.
• Photograms: By placing objects on top of the coated material, the items’ shapes get printed.

Cyanotype was first employed to make technical blueprints, but naturalists also adopted it to catalog plant species. Nowadays, it is used principally in the art community as an alternative photographic process…