On a New Tack.

 While I haven't abandoned the work of the last few posts I'm also trying out grasses and leaves for other sun prints. These are the leaves of a native Geranium, called (I think) Soft Cranesbill. The shapes are lovely and each one just slightly different to the next.

                                                          A collection of grass seed heads.

More Playing with The Shapes.

  I think this image above is far too complex to use as a printing plate, but it was fun to create.

               I can see this design printed out and used as some sort of collage element I think.

Isolating Motifs.

 If you looked at the sun dyed prints that I posted from last weekend very carefully, you may have noticed several motifs that looked as if they might be useful! This one is from the top of the spiral design, something like a leaf , a seed or a microscopic creature perhaps.

For further sun printing I need to make a negative and a positive, which you can see above. I've used 2 or 3 of the motifs and changed their orientation and size in Photoshop. I'm not sure if this idea is going anywhere, but it's fun!

New Coffee Design.

    I had coffee with 2 friends earlier in the week and lo and behold, a new coffee froth design.

                             The top one is perhaps the most definite as these 2 are a bit blurry.

Mystery Plant.

 This little plant growing in a rocky and isolated part of the bush is a mystery to me. I have no idea if it is a weed or a wild flower. I've only ever seen it growing in this one area and I think that if it were a weed I might have spotted it in a more accessible place, in a paddock or somewhere more open.

It almost looks like a tiny orchid, but it isn't featured in any orchid book that I have, either Australian or specifically Victorian. The leaves are odd, with little yellow ones just above the roots and longer ones on the stems. A mystery indeed!

Wildflowers.

 Being Spring it's wildflower season, though here in the Ranges it's still a little early for some of them. Commonly called 'Egg and Bacon' because of it's colours this is one of many species of Hop Pea.

                              Another one with a appealing common name, Billy Buttons.

 This I think has the best common name of all "Fairy Aprons", much better than it's correct name of Beuglehole's Bladderwort!

I don't think that these Bulbine Lilies have any other name, but in a mass like this when the sun is out they are a wonderful spread of golden yellow.

More Sun Printing.

 This is the result of an afternoon sun printing from a series of negatives that I made. I got very few what I would call perfect prints, mainly I think because of the condensation that formed under the glass that I used to keep the negative and the treated fabric in close contact.

Still, I keep learning more and more of the technique as I go along, so it was not a wasted afternoon by any means.

Holding it Down.

These smaller above ground tree roots seem to be holding down the larger root. I wonder how that happened.

Caper White Butterfly.

 I've been having trouble recently with getting good macro shots with my camera, especially using the telephoto lens for things like this butterfly at a distance.

 I actually decided to read the manual for the camera today and I soon found out what I was doing wrong. This Caper White butterfly was at a reasonable distance, so I'm pleased with the focus that I have achieved.

                              I guess it's a case of when in doubt, read the instruction book!

Gardening under Difficulties

I was admiring a garden here on a blog, lamenting the fact that we have to keep everything covered against the marauding possums, rats and birds, while they can have everything uncovered.

                           Even enclosing everything like this, the animals still eat their way in.

                                                                          Like this!

Freezing Day!

 The weather has turned cold again, but luckily I didn't have in mind to do any more sun printing for the moment. I need to make some more negatives first. This is a cross section of an old tree stump, with the more interesting half copied and pasted to make  design.

                    Here I've isolated the central part, which looks like a totem pole or something.

This is the negative version which I will need to sun print with. I think that the detail is a bit too blurry to make a good print, but it's worth a try.

Sunny Day!

Today was a very sunny day, in fact too sunny and hot, as the prints developed much faster than I expected. Where the instructions suggested up to 24 minutes exposure I found that 5 minutes was about enough.

   These are 2 variations of the same negative, obviously the one on the left has more detail.
Ooops, I just realised that they aren't from the identical negative after all, but variations on a theme!

 
 

 The next 2 are also the reverse of the same negative.
The lower one has more detail, but the one to the left is also quite interesting. As I intend only using parts of each sun print, I have plenty to go on with just these 4, quite apart from all the others that I printed today.

Playing Around Again.

 While waiting for a good sunny day to continue with my sun printing I decided to make a collection of negatives for printing so I would be all ready for the sunshine......and the time to print again.
This is a photo of some ice on the wind screen of the car seen from inside the car.

 Here I have isolated a portion of the picture, changed it to back and white and used a filter to get the gradations in greys.

 Here I've copied and pasted 4 times to make a complete shape, added several pastes of the black borders which I have reversed to show white on the black background.

                   Having fun with a colour filter, though this is not what I was aiming for!

Windy Day.

                 I rather liked the shape of this spider web festooned with dry dandelion seeds.

No Sun.

 I exchanged my bottle of 'teal' coloured dye without any problems, but there was no sunshine all day to try it out. I'm not very hopeful that it will be different actually, as I'm sure that it will be part of the same batch as the defective one.

 No sun meant that the lighting was good for taking pictures of my front garden, always at its best at this time of the year.

Not Happy!

 Having done this test, I am 100% convinced that this dye is not Teal in colour. It is a different consistency to the other dyes, being very thick, gloopy and transparent, whereas the others are quite runny and opaque. Old stock I wonder?

This is the Burnt Orange colour and although it's a bit blotchy and not as deep a colour as I would like, it is more or less what it is supposed to be. I'm going back to the shop where I purchased the dyes to get a replacement Teal tomorrow, and hopefully it won't be the same batch!

Sunshine!

 The sun shone beautifully for most of the day, although I did run out of direct sunlight by about 4 pm when I still had some more samples that I wanted to try.

Here I sprinkled salt onto the fabric after the ferns were in place.  Looks a bit like a starry sky or something. I just wanted more texture than the flat colour.

 I thought that I could use the sun light streaming through the windows into my work room, but after several rather dismal prints I tried putting the tests outside and the result was very much better.

 This is using a negative that I made in various sizes from a photo that I took a few weeks back of the cut surface of a tree fern trunk. It's a fascinating image that I know I will return to again and again.

 I like the effect of 2 different colours blended into the one print.  I'll certainly try more of this technique.

 A negative made from a slab of stone with what appears to be a fossil in it, but I have been reliably informed that it is actually a pattern made by water seeping into cracks in the rocks. Who knows, but it looks like fern to me!

                     This is a negative again made from a photo of a huge old banksia cone.