Lumen Printing

In todays lesson we were looking at an alternative printing technique called Lumen Printing. Creating these prints is very similar to creating photograms, except the photographic paper is exposed using UV light and for a much longer time. 

To create my Lumen print I simply placed leaves and flowers of different densities over photographic paper and then placed glass over the top of that to keep it all still. I then positioned it all in direct sunlight to expose the paper for 30 minutes.

After the 30 minutes I took all of the flowers away and quickly scanned the image into the computer to save it. As there is no way to fix these images they can only be saved as digital copies. I opened the image up in Photoshop, cropped it to get rid of any white edging and played around with the curves to give it more contrast.

I’m really happy with the final outcome. It’s a simple technique but the results are really interesting. One problem I had with this technique was that because I had used freshly picked plants, they gave off quite a lot of condensation underneath the glass, meaning that some of the detail of the finer plants is lost. If I were to create more Lumen prints I would use only dried plants and I would experiment more with objects of varying density. It would also be interesting to use different types of photographic paper as they produce different colours.

x