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Sold two cyanotypes this month. Each one needed a full day of sun, and a day of sun in Porto in January is a small miracle. I waited eleven days between them just for the light to show up. Fourteen hours of actual exposure time across both, plus the coating, the washing in seawater, the drying, the flat files. €160 for the pair. I worked it out at the kitchen table and it came to about €11 an hour, and that's before the paper and the chemistry. The strange part is I'm not even angry. I set those prices. I've had the same number in my head for three years and not once questioned it. The print is a thing I love making more than anything, so I kept pricing it like a hobby that occasionally pays rent. I'm not raising it to €400 tomorrow. I think I'm going to test €85 per print and see who flinches. Even that feels like lying, which tells me exactly how far I am from a fair number.

A woman from my building knocked on my door last week, said she'd seen my prints on Instagram, asked if I could teach her the process. I quoted her €80 for a two-hour session, materials included. She laughed. Said it's just sun and water, couldn't I just show her in five minutes. I didn't charge her. I showed her in five minutes. And she saw the paper turn blue and said oh, that's it? like she'd caught me at something. Anyway yesterday I spent three hours on one 8x10 print. Three hours from coating the paper to washing it in seawater I drove to the coast for, because the colour is different with real salt water. The sun did its part but I hauled the rest of it there. I don't know why it's so hard to say: the knowledge is the thing I'm selling, not the materials. But people see a blue stain on paper and think it's a recipe, not a practice.

I've been developing prints in the Atlantic for two years now, and I love what the salt does to the blue during washing. But when the paper dries there's always a fine white bloom across the surface, like frost that won't lift. I've tried longer freshwater rinses after, soaking the washed print overnight, even ironing it flat. The crystals come back around the edges no matter what. I know some chemists would just tell me to stop using seawater, but I can't. The water from Matosinhos beach gives me a tone I've never matched with tap water, this deeper green-blue under the Prussian. It's not a technical accident, it's part of the piece. But the bloom makes it look unfinished, like a bad print, and I can't tell if I'm seeing it as a flaw or if it actually is one. Has anyone lived with a material that fights back like this and just accepted it as part of the work? Or is there a fix I'm not seeing?

I've been working on a series of photograms of mussel shells, trying to capture their texture and the way the light falls on them. I'm using my usual process, exposing them to the sun and developing in saltwater, but the final blue just feels a bit… dead. It's not getting that deep, luminous quality I usually get. I wonder if it's the paper, or if the light here has changed so much this time of year. Has anyone else experienced this? Any thoughts on how to bring back that vibrancy?

A friend from years back messaged me wanting a print for her new apartment. Small thing, maybe A4 size. I said €80 because that's what I used to charge for that size before I stopped selling through galleries. Felt fair between friends. Then I went to buy the paper. Hahnemühle Platinum Rag, because anything cheaper buckles in the saltwater bath and I've learned that lesson the hard way. €22 just for the sheet. The frame I found was simple pine, nothing fancy, €18. Then the glass. Then I had to redo the exposure twice because the light was wrong last week, that's three sheets of paper now, and the third one I messed up the rinse and it came out streaky. I don't know what I think the paper and chemicals and framing should cost. But €80 for a thing that took three afternoons to get right and eats materials the way it does... I think I'm scared to charge what it actually costs because the number sounds too big for something blue on paper. And that's a me problem, not a market problem.

Yesterday a man watched me hang a cyanotype to dry at the market stall and asked if I'd considered laminating them "so they'd last longer." Laminating. The Prussian blue, the paper that's been soaked in the same Atlantic water my father worked in, and he wants me to run it through a plastic machine like a restaurant menu. I told him the blue fades a little over the years and that's the point. He looked at me like I'd said I pee on them for tone. Which, to be fair, is closer to what I do, since it's seawater and sun doing half the work. I've been thinking about permanence a lot lately. We fought the sea for so long to hold things still. Some of us held the camera. Some of us just let the light decide what stays and what goes. I know which one feels more honest to me now.

Left four cyanotypes face-up on the boardwalk by Matosinhos to dry in the sun, went off for a coffee and got talking, came back and the tide had already taken two of them. Not ruined, just gone, carried out somewhere into the Atlantic. The other two were soaked through with saltwater which honestly might have done them good. Everybody says oh no, your work. But I sat there a minute and thought, that's the process. I spend all year trying to get seawater onto paper and the sea just decides when it's ready. My grandmother used to say the sea takes what it wants, and she never meant it as a complaint. The ironic thing is the two it took were the best of the batch. Of course they were.

Small gallery in Lisbon took interest in the cyanotypes a few months ago. They asked for the usual things, then asked how many followers I had. I said about nine hundred and they went quiet for a while. I thought that was the end of it. They wrote back last week with a date. The woman said she'd rather work with someone whose work she actually saw in person than someone with thirty thousand followers who can't hold a conversation about paper. I keep thinking about how close that came to nothing. Nine hundred of those followers are probably bots and family. The two or three collectors I have found me through a newsletter I send maybe eight times a year, mostly just photos of the prints drying and the sea that day. No strategy. I just got tired of performing for the algorithm and started doing the one thing I actually like, which is showing the work itself. Not sure this scales into advice. Just glad quiet work still has a door that opens sometimes.

I had a gallery once, small, coastal, seemed like a good fit, and after they took my cyanotypes, they asked if I could "add more colour." Said the blue was beautiful but maybe a bit limiting for collectors. I said no, but it stayed with me longer than it should have. That quiet pressure to become more sellable. Have you had a gallery ask you to change your work? Did you bend or hold the line?

Sold a run of small prints on the Instagram side in three days. Little 15cm squares, cheap enough that people don't think twice. Then a collector who bought one messaged asking why I don't do a large version of the same piece, one meter wide, because that's what she'd actually hang. Thing is, the big ones don't sell through social. They need to be seen in person, in a gallery, with the light right. I can photograph a cyanotype until the sea turns grey and it still flattens into just another blue rectangle on a feed. So I keep making the small ones because they move, and the collector sits there wanting the big one I haven't printed. There's a version of this economy I don't fully understand yet. The work people say they want and the work people actually buy, they're cousins, not the same person. Anyway I'm prepping the large one this week. I think I'll keep making the smalls too. One feeds the other, even if I can't say exactly how.

People assume cyanotype means sun, and it does, but it also means you're a hostage to the weather. I spent all spring waiting on bright days and I'm tired of it. So this week I tried something I'd put off for years: a UV lamp box, built from a cheap grow light and a sheet of glass over a wooden tray. It's not the same. The light is too even, too patient. There's no moment where the shadow shifts and you have to decide if it's a cloud passing or just your own hand in the way. Sunlight makes you commit. The lamp just sits there and waits for you to be sure, and I don't trust that. But it's Wednesday afternoon in April and Porto is grey, and I have three sheets of paper coated and nothing better to do. So. The lamp got me further than the weather did. The prints came out flat. I'm trying to be okay with that. Flat might be honest in its own way.

my brother was not good at photography. like, genuinely bad. half the frames are his thumb. the other half are blurry pictures of things he was excited about, usually food or our cousin's dog. but I found the box of negatives last week, tucked behind some tax paperwork in a closet I'd been avoiding. spent the whole weekend making contact sheets in the darkroom at the community center, just to see what was on them. there's this one where he's trying to photograph the ocean and instead got like, a wall of beige blur. and I can't stop looking at it. it's so incompetent. it's so him. I've been staring at it like it's the most profound thing I've ever seen. I'm going to try to work with these somehow. torn paper collages from the contact sheets maybe, or cyanotypes of his worst frames. not sure yet. but I've been sitting with the fact that he put all this energy into documenting his life and most of it is just... bad. and that's the whole point somehow. anyway. if anyone has experience working with found negatives that are mostly garbage, I'd love to hear how you approached it without making it sentimental garbage yourself.

Left my cyanotype wash tank sitting for three weeks because I kept telling myself I'd get to it, and when I finally opened it the chemistry had settled into these distinct strata. Blue on top, pale haze underneath, a few flecks of paper lint drifting slow like they were suspended mid-thought. I nearly just drained it. But I stirred it once out of curiosity and honestly the gradient it made on the side of the jar was more beautiful than half the prints I've made this month. So now I'm sitting here with a broken rule of mine not to photograph the process, because I want to remember that even the neglect has something to say. The sea does this too, if you look where the waves turn back. Layers. Somebody tell me I'm not the only one who keeps almost-useful tanks of half-dead chemistry around out of sentiment. My partner says it's hoarding. I say it's patience with no deadline.

I've been making cyanotypes for over a decade and this week a sheet of paper that should have been a deep Prussian blue came out of the seawater wash a muddy grey. Same paper, same emulsion, same sun exposure time I've done a hundred times. The only thing I changed was the potassium ferricyanide, new batch from a supplier I hadn't used before. I keep turning it over in my hands. It looks like a photograph taken on a day when the light gave up. Not ugly, exactly, but wrong in a way I can't quite name, like hearing a familiar voice speak in a key it doesn't belong to. I've read that old ferricyanide can be the culprit, that it degrades, but this was supposedly fresh. Part of me wonders if I should just chase it down like an engineer, test everything methodically, rule out the variables. The other part of me is almost charmed by it. It's the first time in years the process has surprised me. Anyone else ever had a chemical that stopped behaving and you had to decide whether to fix it or learn to love what it made?

For years I tagged every studio photo with the exact spot, Porto, Matosinhos, the beach name, the café where I dry the paper. Thought it helped people find me locally. And maybe it did. But a few months ago I just stopped. Posted a cyanotype of a cuttlebone I found at sunrise, no location, nothing. A woman I'd never seen walked into the studio three days later holding her phone with the post on it. She lives in the building next to mine. She said she'd walked past my door for two years and never knew what happened inside until she saw that bone and recognised the light. Made me think about how much we over-explain ourselves online trying to be findable, while the people right next to us have no idea we exist. Maybe the real local marketing is just being specific enough that someone local recognises their own morning in your work.

A gallery I was talking to last year kept asking if I could "brighten" the blues. Add some orange, maybe. Make them more vibrant. They wanted my cyanotypes to pop like a screen. I said no. Walked away. Still feels right but I wonder sometimes if I should have tried. What's the furthest a gallery has asked you to change your work, and did you bend or hold?

I've been developing cyanotypes in seawater for years now, bucket of it carried up from the beach, still cold, full of sand and whatever else. But today the tide was high and I thought, just try it. Hold the paper in the actual water, let the wave wash over it. Held it by one corner. Second wave ripped it right out of my hand. Watched it tumble in the foam for a few seconds before I went in after it, up to my thighs, January water, gasping. Got it back. Ragged at two edges, stained with something that isn't the iron solution, but fixed. It's drying now pinned to the studio wall with the tear showing. Might be the best print I've made this year. Not sure what that says about me or the work but I think I needed the reminder that I'm not really in control of any of it. The water decides.

I used to write these careful captions about cyanotype chemistry, the UV exposure times, the pH of the seawater I develop in. Thought people needed to understand the craft to appreciate the print. Then I posted a photo of a print that went completely wrong, overexposed, paper curled, the blue almost black, the seaweed I'd placed shifting mid-exposure so the whole thing was a ghost. I wrote "The sun moved and so did I. This one belongs to the Atlantic now." It got more engagement than any of my tidy process posts. People commented about their own ruined things, the work they'd abandoned, the projects that fell apart. A gallery owner in Amsterdam messaged me asking if I had more "failures" available. I don't think people want to understand how it's made. I think they want to feel that they're allowed to make mistakes too. So now I show the ones that didn't work, alongside the ones that did. The studio floor after a bad week. The prints I fished out of the tide at the wrong moment. The work sells the same. But the conversations are different.

Early on, a gallery told me my work would sell better if I made editions, numbered prints, multiples, something they could move more of. I understood the logic, but cyanotypes are so much about the single moment, the sun that day, that particular seawater, the way the paper dries. I couldn't make myself do it. I said no and walked away, and it took me a while to feel sure about that decision. What's the thing a gallery asked you to change about your work that you wouldn't, or maybe should have, and how did you know?

The gallery owner took me aside after looking at my cyanotypes and said, very kindly, that the work was beautiful but maybe "a bit too quiet" for their clients. Could I try something with more obvious subject matter? A wave, a boat, something people recognise. I said I'd think about it. I didn't. What's the nicest way someone has tried to change what you make? The most polite "could you be less yourself?"