Writer and photography / Rosemary Horn
Rosie Horn lets her images develop slowly on the actual plant.
Overview
Make a positive
- Even out tonal range
- Print on transparency
Pick a leaf
- Vegetable leaves such as Spinach and Pak Choy
- Leaves from undergrowth plants such as Lily, Nasturtium
- Leaves from trees with soft broad leaves
Sandwich together in a contact printing frame
- Make sure the leaf has maximum contact with the positive
Put in the Sun
- Length of time could be half a day to 1 week
Materials
- Inkjet printer
- Inkjet transparency
- Sellotape
- Scissors
- Leaves
- Contact printing frame
Making prints on leaves is a hit and miss affair. There are a few factors outside of your control that will affect the final outcome, such as the amount of sunshine, the type of leaf and its reaction to the available sun.
The key area to focus on is creating a good positive, this will make the world of difference to your success rate.
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After taking photos (I use digital) you then need to process them in Photoshop to convert them to black and white. You need to aim at creating a positive that is even enough in tonal range to achieve maximum detail yet still with enough contrast to make it dynamic. The tonal range of a leaf is narrower than photographic paper. Using Levels helps to even out the tonal range. Avoiding photos with large areas of strong darks and highlights will help improve your results. By masking a dark or light area you can use the levels to even the tone and create more contrast.
I print the finished positive using an inkjet printer onto transparency. I print two copies to achieve enough density, I sellotape them together and then sellotape another layer of transparency over the exposed ink of the print so that it doesn’t stick to the leaf or the glass becoming ruined, the positives should be kept and looked after, they are not throw away items. You may prefer to use traditional negatives which also work well if you get the exposure right, not too dark as they tend to be to dense and the leaf will struggle to pick up any detail.
I would suggest experimenting with making your positive as what has worked for me in New Zealand may not be appropriate for conditions in Europe or North America or wherever you may be.
I then pick a leaf I want use and put the positive on top of it and sandwich it in my contact printing frame. I make sure the leaf is as flat as possible, making sure the frame is very firmly sandwiched together. If the leaf has a particularly solid stem you can build up the surface behind the leaf with card until you can achieve good contact with the positive.
I put this in the sun and depending on the sunlight I check it during the day or in a couple of days. Contact printing frames have a hinge at the back so you can undo half the frame and pull the leaf away from the positive to see how much it has developed. Each leaf will react differently every time, but you will start to get a feel for when the leaf has reached its optimum.
Once the image is on the leaf, the leaf will be very thin and very delicate, as they dry out completely they can become quite brittle so it is important have a book or folder to store them in, something with quite firm pages. To mount them I used some acid free glue and used a small amount to fix them to some Acid free card / matt board.
These images are unfixed, so if you choose to display them bear this in mind. You can always make more.
7 Comments
Thanks for the article, Rosie. Question: Have you ever tried sandwiching a leaf between two glass plates and putting it in a view camera, leaving the shutter open on a scene all day to see if you get a positive?
Hello Andrew,
Not I haven’t tried this, but it would certainly be worth a try.
I have been asked about using a camera obscura before, the light is far more restricted using this or a view camera. Using the contact printing method the exposure is a few days so I imagine it will take even longer using a view camera and the leaf has a limited time frame for it to work. The other issue with the time it takes is movement and the sun moving. Like I said definitely worth a go to see what happens. Thanks for your suggestion. Let me know if you try it yourself.
What have you tried to fix the image? Have you used a peroxide mix as a bath, like cyanotypes?
I was just wondering how long these prints will stay on these leaves? Weeks, days, hours? Just curious.
To answer Kathleen and Kory,
I haven’t tried fixing them yet, I am trying to work out what would work. Perhaps using a mordant that is used to fix natural dye to natural fibre.
In their un fixed state they will last a long time – years – if stored in an album. Much like the Victorians whokept pressed plants and flowers which are still around today. If exposed to sunlight then maybe a week or month depending on the strength of the sun.
Have you tried using an enlarger or a high watt light bulb instead of sun light to streamline the process? If so, is there a time you suggest for different types of leaves?
Hi Christopher,
I tried a UV light used for cyanotypes but it didn’t work after 10 mins. The idea for me was to use a natural process for a low impact environmental print so I was not interested in pursuing an artifical light where there is so much natural light around. I don’t think an artificial light is strong enough to create an image before the leaf dries out, but I could be wrong.
Rosie