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I collected a few litres of seawater two weeks ago during the storm, when the sea was throwing everything at the rocks. I strain it before developing prints in it because there is always sand, sometimes a bit of weed, once a small crab leg. Kept it in glass jars on the bench. Today I used the last of it and I already miss that particular batch. Each one is different. The temperature, the salt, whatever the sea was carrying that day. It changes the blue, barely, but it changes. Now I need to wait for the next storm to get more, and I resent that the water in the tap won't do. It is a strange way to work. I know that. But the paper remembers where the water came from even if my eye can barely tell.

Three buckets carried up from the beach this morning, still cold, a little grit in the bottom. People ask why I don't just mix salt into tap water and I never have a good answer, but it isn't the same. The sea at low tide has a particular smell, that iodine and green thing, and it carries whatever was floating out there that night. My prints pick up traces of it. Maybe not visible, but I know. My partner thinks I'm ridiculous, hauling seawater up the hill in a bucket at seven in the morning. He's not wrong. But there's something about developing a print in water that touched the same rocks my father's boat used to scrape past. It matters to me even if nobody else can see it. Today's batch turned out too dark. The sun came through the clouds wrong and I overexposed. I'll pour the water back into the sea when I'm done. It feels like returning the favor.

Someone asked me at the Feira da Vandoma last month what a cyanotype costs, and I heard myself say "it depends on the paper," which is true and also a way of not answering. Here is the real thing. A 30x40 print on Arches, seawater-developed, sun for however long it takes that day, I ask 120. It could be three hours of work or it could be four days of waiting for the right light and starting over. I don't count. If I counted I would have to charge something nobody in that market is going to pay, and I am not sure I would want to charge it either. So the price is a kind of average of the good days and the ruined ones. It works out. It is also the reason I have never said a number out loud here, and why I felt a small shame writing 120 just now. What I keep circling is this. The friends who ask me to make them something, "just a small one for the hallway," I say yes and then it is not small and it is not free and I have spent a fortnight on it, and I cannot find the door out of that conversation. Not asking anyone to solve it. I think I just wanted to write the number down somewhere.

A gallery in Barcelona wants to do a small solo show in October, my work, but also some documentation of process, which is fair, the whole thing is basically tidepool alchemy. They asked for my notes on the seawater development, dilution ratios, exposure times, how I account for different salinity levels. And I sat down to write it and realised I have none. I just know. I've been doing this so long I can feel it, the weight of the paper, the way the light sits, the smell of the water. I never standardised any of it because every print is a different day, different sun, different batch of Atlantic. I told them I'd put something together and now I'm staring at a blank page trying to remember how to explain something I only understand with my hands. I think this is the gap between making work and showing it. The making is private and intuitive and full of failure and small victories nobody sees. The showing asks you to translate all of that into something legible. I don't know how to do that without flattening it.

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 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.

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.

Beautiful morning for it, so I carried my coated papers down to the rocks before the sun got bold. Wind gusting, spray landing on the corners of three sheets. I left them anyway. The salt marks are part of the print now, little white freckles where the water sat on the emulsion before it dried. I didn't plan that. The sea did. I keep fighting this instinct to control everything. Sun time, water temperature, how long I leave the paper under. Then a day like today reminds me the whole point is I'm not in charge. I just hold the paper down. Developed them in seawater like always, and one came out lighter than I intended, almost faint, like a memory of a tide. I think it's my favourite. I'll sell the "correct" ones and keep that one. Almost forgot to eat lunch again. The winter swims keep me honest about that, at least.🙂

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.

Every cyanotype I make gets developed in sun and seawater, and that is usually beautiful. This week I did a set in the dark, under my own hands, timing the exposure second by second instead of letting the sky decide. I had been avoiding it because I thought losing the sun would flatten everything. It did the opposite. Four prints of a scallop net, all of them finally the blue I keep seeing in my head and never quite got on paper, that deep cold blue the sea goes in January when nobody is in it. I have been printing for years and I still cannot explain why the same formula, the same paper, gives me a different blue depending on the day. But now I know I can hold the door shut myself when I need to. The sun is back tomorrow. I will go back to the beach with the paper and let it do what it wants. It just feels good to know I am not only waiting for weather anymore.

I've been making a series on the beach at Aguda since February. Same stretch, same black rocks, same two hours before the tide turns. What changed is that I started developing the sheets in seawater I carry up from there in a plastic can instead of the tap water in my studio. The prints come out softer, less certain of their own edges. I've been calling that a flaw in my head for four months. A woman bought one on Saturday. The one where the net drags across the top corner, the one I nearly threw away twice because the exposure went too long and the blue got so deep the weed reads almost black. She said it looked like something recovered from water rather than made. I stood there and took her money and said thank you and felt weirdly close to tears. I think the win is not the sale. It's that I stopped treating the sea as contamination in my own process. For years I've been correcting it out. Anyone else here sell the piece that embarrassed them a little? I don't mean the commissioned one. The one you almost didn't put in the folder.

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.

There's a bucket of seawater on my studio floor that's been there since Tuesday. I keep meaning to dump it and I keep not doing it, and now it's become this small fixed point I walk around, like a pet I've forgotten to feed. Probably has something living in it by now. I don't even remember what I was going to use it for. Some experiments I had in mind about development time in colder water, and then the day got away from me like they do. It's not the first time. There's a shelf of dried prints I've never mounted because I liked them better loose, and they're starting to curl. I think half of making work is just this. Holding things long enough to decide they matter, and letting the rest quietly go bad in a bucket.

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 used to check the time. Now I check the tide tables more than the clock on the wall. High tide this morning was at 7:44, I was already down there with a jar, because the water behaves differently an hour either side of the turn. Rougher, more suspended, it carries different things. I've been bringing buckets of seawater back to the studio and using it straight away, same day, while it's still got whatever it picked up. The prints come out different every time. Salt content changes the wash, particles settle into the paper, sometimes there's a tiny piece of bladderwrack stuck to the edge that I leave there because it feels like the sea left its signature. My partner says I smell like low tide when I come home. I don't mind. It's the closest I can get to developing prints in the Atlantic itself without the paper floating away.<｜end▁of▁thinking｜>