One of the many things I love about cyanotypes is their flexibility. I was talking about how to make cyanotypes with a friend and one of the questions she asked was, “Can you make cyanotypes from color film negatives?” I had no answer.
Before she went off to work in Antarctica for a few months she left me some 10cm x 13cm color negatives to play with. I picked out the two images I thought would work best as cyanotypes — not complicated images, and began working.
The first thing I learned was that color film negatives take a long time to expose. After a little testing I settled on an hour and a half exposure time with a UV light indoors (it is dark season after all). If it were midnight sun I would try exposing them at 20 minutes, and then adjust.
The Test One was done on standard Darches hot press water color paper. There is an image, but the rough paper texture was not ideal.
Test Two was on a smooth coated paper. This was better, but still missing the crispness of detail I was hoping for.
Test Three was on Hahnemuhle Matte Photographic paper, and had the crispness I was hoping for. The color was a bit more green, and it took a longer time to wash, but the image sharpness was much improved. This was more what I was looking for.
I don’t have a backlog of large format color negatives so this is not going to be an avenue that I will pursue. But it was interesting to experiment with this, and if you like the effect, then this might be something you enjoy. I suspect that a larger negative would produce better, or at least more easily seen, results. These are small enough that it isn’t really possible, even in the sharpest of the tests, to see the image clearly. But then again, that is part of its charm.