Here are some attempts at lumen prints, which are really easy to make, although clearly there are subtleties to putting the images together, which I could definitely improve upon.

Essentially you just arrange items on top of darkroom photo paper, leave them out in the sun for a bit, and then you’ve got a lovely print.

It’s traditional to use plants and flowers, so I used that as a starting point, and it is very effective, but I also wanted to do something a bit more interesting, so I played around with tissue paper, which I figured would allow some light through and make nice effects. It definitely worked, although I need to be a bit more thoughtful about what images to use, and exercise a bit more quality control if I want to do anything more substantial with this technique.

It’s useful just to play around and learn how it all works.

Some of my first attempts aren’t here as the paper was glossy and I couldn’t photograph them effectively, and I haven’t got a scanner. This paper has a lustre finish so there is still a bit of glare I’m afraid. It’s quite nice in a way that you can never quite capture what the original is like, and also that the originals will fade away. I guess you could fix them, but I haven’t got any chemicals.

This quality is something I’d somehow like to explore. I thought maybe they’d be good postcards and if you were lucky there’ll still be an image and if not you’d just get a random brown sheet of paper!

Anyway, here they are:

And I inverted some of the images too, which I think are also quite nice.