Sunday, I attended a small workshop on Van Dyke printing at the Vermont Center for Photography. I spent an enjoyable afternoon learning a new alternative process.
The Van Dyke process is very similar in many ways to cyanotype but yields a nice chocolaty brown print instead of the blue of cyanotype. It is an iron-based process (like cyanotype) in which the photoreduction of iron is used to drive the reduction of silver which actually forms the image.
I sent three files to the instructor (Bill Dixon) ahead of time and he prepared very nice digital negatives from them.
Scans of the resulting prints are shown below… pretty good for a first attempt, if I do say so myself!
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- Van Dyke Brown Print #1
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- Van Dyke Brown Print #2
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- Van Dyke Brown Print #3
I have all of the chemicals needed to try this at home… now I just need to find some time!