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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.

Small one. I've been rinsing the cyanotypes in tap water for two years, out of habit and a bit of fear, and this week I finally just carried a tray down to the rocks at Foz and let the Atlantic finish them. I expected to lose the lot. Instead the blues came out softer, with a grain in the paper I've been trying to fake with brushes. One of them, a photogram of a piece of net I picked up in Matosinhos, has a shadow in the corner from where a wave came over the tray edge. I would have thrown that away before. My father would have laughed at me standing in the water with paper. Not unkindly. Anyway, I'm not going back to tap water for the final wash.

A woman at the last market stood in front of the big one for a long time. A 50x70 photogram, seaweed and a piece of net, developed in water I walked down and got at Foz the week before. She liked it. Then she said, well, the sun does most of it, no? So it should be cheaper, no? I think I said something polite. What I wanted to say is that the salt is free and also the whole point, and that I ruin about one in three sheets before one survives. I asked 380. Not the number I wanted, the number I said out loud. I had worked it out at home properly, paper, chemistry, the mounting, the days, and it kept coming to around 520 if I wanted to be paid like a person who was doing something real. Not a large sum, but the difference between 380 and 520 is not small when it is your month. She did not buy it. Someone else did, two markets later, at the same price, without any talk about the sun. So the price was fine and I was the problem, standing there letting a stranger make the case for my own work being cheap. The next one I ask 520. I already know I will be nervous. Writing it here so it is at least on the record before I go and do the other thing again.

I finally worked up the courage to ask a gallery in Lisbon to take some of my cyanotypes. Twelve pieces, seaweed and net photograms, all of them made with seawater from the beach near my flat. She offered me 180 each. I said yes because I was tired and because she said it in a way that made 180 sound like a favour. They went up in her window at 520. Three sold before Christmas. I know about the standard split, I know she has rent to pay and she has to make it worth her while. I am not naive about that. What I did not expect is how quiet it made me feel, walking past that window, doing the arithmetic in my head every time. My paper costs about 9 euros a sheet and I ruin maybe one in four. The seawater I carry up from the shore in a bucket like an idiot. I don't say any of that to her because it sounds like I want pity rather than a fair price. I wrote a new number down in my notebook and I have not sent it yet. 340. Which still feels like too much and also like not enough, and I cannot tell which of those is the honest one. What I keep circling is that she never asked what I wanted for them. She just told me a number, and I took it, the way I always do. That part is mine.

Not a critique anyone gave me. Just something I have been sitting with all week. I have a photogram of a piece of fishing net I picked off the sand at Foz in October. The net is right. The edges are right. Twenty-two minutes under the sun, seawater wash, and every knot reads clean against the paper. Technically it is the best exposure I have made this year. And I feel nothing in front of it. It looks like a diagram of a net. The ones I keep pinned to the wall are all failures. A print from last winter where the wind moved the paper and the whole lower half smeared into a soft gray, and there, right at the smear, is something I have never been able to make on purpose. I have tried to reproduce it maybe forty times since. No luck. I am starting to think the accident is not a mistake I should be learning to control. It is the actual thing. I know some of you will say ruin it deliberately, and I have tried that too, and deliberate ruin looks exactly like what it is. There is a difference between a thing going wrong and a thing being let go of. Anyway. I am not looking for a fix exactly. Maybe just someone to tell me they have the same drawer of technically correct, spiritually empty work and what they did with it.

Been developing my cyanotypes in actual seawater for about two years now and I have mostly been fighting it. The salt eats the highlights, the paper drinks differently depending on how cold the water is, and I have thrown away more sheets than I can count without wanting to add up the cost. Today I pulled one out of the tray, a photogram of bladderwrack and a piece of torn net I picked up at Foz in November, and for once the blue held. It went a greyish blue, the color of a wet stone, and the weed kept every thin vein of itself. I stood there dripping on the floor for a while. It is a small thing. It is one print. But two years of arguing with the Atlantic and today it felt less like arguing. Also I am drying it on the radiator which I know is wrong. Tell me nothing.

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?

I printed a photogram last week, a piece of net from the beach at Foz and three strands of kelp, on a sheet of Arches I had coated a bit too thin. The exposure came out uneven in a way I can only describe as accidental, one edge dissolving into nothing, the net reading almost like smoke. I showed it to someone whose eye I trust and they said the bottom left was muddy. So I went back in and I fixed it. Re-coated, exposed eleven minutes instead of nine, washed it in seawater the same as always. It is a cleaner print. It is also dead. The thing that made it worth looking at was the part I called a mistake because someone else named it one. I keep the bad one pinned above the sink now, where it gets the steam from the kettle and has started to curl at the corner. I am not going to pretend that is a statement. It is just where the nail already was. What I actually want to ask, and I am not sure I want the answer, is how you tell the difference between a flaw you should defend and a flaw you are just sentimental about. I have been at this long enough to know the second one is real. I just cannot always see which one I am holding.

I developed a photogram of a piece of net in seawater this week, which I do often, but I left it in longer than usual, maybe forty minutes, and the water crept up the paper unevenly and left a hard line across the middle where it stopped. Everything above it is pale, washed out, almost nothing. Below it the blue is deep and the net reads clearly. Two prints in one sheet, basically. I've been staring at it for three days. Part of me thinks the line is the whole point, that it says something about where the water reached and where it didn't, and I should stop trying to make it stop happening. The other part thinks I've just made a mistake and I'm dressing it up because I don't want to start again. What I keep coming back to is that I can't reproduce it. If I decide the line is the piece, I have about as much control over the next one as I do over the weather. And I'm not sure I'm honest enough with myself to know whether I like it or whether I'm tired. I've had prints where the accident was clearly a gift and I knew it straight away. This one I genuinely don't know. That's the part I'd like help with, if anyone has a way of telling the difference that isn't just waiting a month and hoping you feel differently.

I have a photogram I made last week, a net and two lengths of eelgrass on 40x50 Bergger Cot 320, and I cannot tell if it is finished or just underdone. It sat in the sun fourteen minutes. The net is fine, the knots held, that pale bone-colour against the blue. But the eelgrass came out as a soft grey smear, no edge, no bite, and I keep looking at it thinking there is a decision in there I did not make. Everything I have read says go longer, push the exposure until the blue goes almost black and you lose the paper's warmth. The last time I pushed it that far the print went cold and dead and I ended up using it to test for something else. So I am stuck between two failures. The one where nothing is decided, and the one where everything is decided and none of it is mine. I did a small version on scraps, 10x15, same plants, eighteen minutes, and the water marks along the edge came out like something I would actually hang. So maybe it is the size. Big sheets hide from you, they take the light differently and I am never sure the coating is even across the whole thing. If you work with these long exposures, how do you know when to stop? Not the technical version, I know the technical version. The other one.

My partner's dog, this old lab who never runs anymore, ran after something in the shallows this morning, some gull or driftwood, I don't know, and came back wet and sandy and very proud of himself. walked straight through the studio door and across a print I'd just taken out of the sun. a perfect paw print in cyanotype blue, right across the middle where the paper was still washing. I was so angry for about ten seconds. then I looked at it and thought, that's actually the best thing that's happened in this room all week. the print was fine, just a nice photogram of seaweed. now it has a ghost dog in it. I'm framing it.