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.