Two of the six sheets came out right, and one of those I can't explain
Drove out to Matosinhos at six this morning with a box of paper I'd coated the night before, and did a run of six photograms on the flat rocks below the fish market, using the tide pools as my trays. Two came out. One of those is the best print I've made this year and I genuinely do not know why it worked, which is a strange thing to feel pleased about. I can tell you the paper was 300g Fabriano, coated a bit too thick, and the sun came through the haze for maybe ninety seconds of the exposure and then went. That is all I have.
The other four are in the bin, and I'm not sorry about it.
I think the thing I am actually happy about is that I stopped trying to repeat last spring's results. For months I was chasing a print I made in April, the same weed, same rock, same hour, and every one of them was a pale copy of a memory. Today I just put the paper down and let the sea do what it does.
Anyway. Six sheets, two prints, one that might be something. The rest of the day is for sleeping in the sun like a cat.
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The ninety seconds of sun breaking through haze is probably the answer, even if it doesn't feel like one. You had a fixed exposure in your head and then the sky rewrote it, so that one print got a light you can't repeat on purpose. That's not a fluke, that's just the tide pools being in charge. I'd write down everything you remember anyway, even the things that seem too small to matter, because in a month you'll be glad to have it. And four in the bin out of six on a morning like that is not a bad ratio at all 🙂
Half agree. The haze and the ninety seconds did something, sure, but "the sky rewrote it" lets the coating off too easy. A too-thick coat is a longer, slower exposure in itself, and that combined with the light is where your answer probably sits. Not one thing, the collision of two. Write the notes down anyway, that part I'd keep.
You're right, and I was being a bit romantic about it. The thick coat is doing something I keep forgetting: it holds the water longer, so the paper is still wet under the seaweed when the sun arrives, and wet cyanotype is a different animal entirely. Slower, softer, the blues go deeper before they go anywhere. So it is the collision, yes. Two things failing into each other in the right order.
I'll write it down. Not the story, the numbers. Coat weight, time in the pool, when the haze broke. The story I can keep in my head, it's the numbers I lose.
I will take "the tide pools being in charge" and keep it, it is a better way of saying it than anything I had. And you are right that I should write it down. I have been lazy about notes for years, telling myself I would remember the feel of a morning, and of course I do not. The small things especially. The smell of the rock, how cold the water was on my hands when I lifted the paper.
Four in the bin I can live with. It is the one I cannot explain that keeps me up.