Let there be light…
I know the last few posts haven’t had much photos actually in them, and this one is going to seem exactly the same, but allow me a bit of indulgence as I’m not just a photographer as I am a builder… although this is my blog so I guess I can talk about what I want.
Taking a photo is in many ways only part of the equation, never mind such processes like post—production but another major part is the medium to which the image is presented; without getting full McLuhan on you, the medium is as much a part of the message.
I don’t want to rabbit on about the differences between print vs digital, I don’t particularly care and they both have their merits, but the one process I absolutely fell in love with conceptually is the creation of cyanotypes. As the name suggests these are blue coloured prints that are created using a medium on paper with an image imposed on them, roughly think of blueprints and you get a rough idea (in fact these images looks great as blueprints).
Again I won’t get too bogged down on specifics but I want to explore this medium for my upcoming exhibition series, one of the images can be viewed here, and like all analog photography process it uses UV light as a way of producing an image on a medium. This function is typically down by the big yellow thing that hangs in the sky; however because it’s hard to control the amount of UV on a consistent basis over a period of time, and the sheer stubbornness of it refusing to turn off on command, we often look to other alternatives of exposing our work… enter the UV light bed.
As the name somewhat suggest it’s a bed of UV light that is used to expose a area to consistant light over a period of time, typically in photography a piece of paper with an UV sensitive emulsion on it, but can also be used to cure resin and repairs sun damaged plastics with hydrogen peroxide called ‘retrobrighting’. At TAFE they have a couple of these machines for students to use as part of their course ware, and I will have access to them as I need to produce a series of six cyanotypes by the end of the years… but I don’t think like that, I’m a builder after all.
With a bit of foreknowledge, and a background in bodging things together, I decided to make a UV light bed out of UV LED strips and a shadow box picture frame. I’ve been working on getting the pieces together for over a month (I didn’t think the first 5m of strips would and ordered a second strip) and after some back-of-the-envelope calculations I finally set about making it this weekend, or at least tried to get as much down with other work that needed to get done.
I’ve still got a ways to go as I’m currently adding some reflective tape to the stripes to (hopefully) help keep it secured, because it’s only gripping on MDF board so it’s likely to fail at some point, and to aid is reflectively to (again hopefully) even out any hot spots. Look I’m building this as I go and I haven’t even gotten around to testing the strength of the UV led strips yet.
That being said it’s always a good feeling to flex my building muscles on a photography project and I’ve already got plans on future projects with this and my newly discovered book creating itch.
S
