A Cyanotype Setup Under €40

Cyanotype is one of the few photographic processes where the complete chemistry costs less than a night out. The two iron salts behind the blue have been the same since 1842, a two-bottle sensitizer set runs €16–25, and the light source — the sun — is free. Nothing about the €40 ceiling is a compromise; it is roughly what the process genuinely costs.

The instinct is to treat the chemistry as the expensive part and the paper as an afterthought, and the budget works exactly the other way around. The sensitizer is a one-time purchase that coats dozens of sheets over months of printing. Paper leaves the budget one sheet at a time: every print costs a sheet, every failed print costs a sheet, and a 30-sheet pad disappears long before either bottle does. Buy the chemistry once, then put the rest — and every euro that follows — into paper.

The classic sensitizer is only two chemicals — ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide — dissolved separately in water and combined in equal parts just before coating. A pre-mixed set gives you exactly that in two premeasured bottles: fill with water, shake, wait for it to dissolve. What it saves is not money but equipment and handling — no scale, no weighing out fine powders (the one step where a dust mask is sensible), no recipe to get wrong on day one.

Buying the salts separately looks like the frugal route and, at starter quantities, usually is not: 100 g of each from a photochemistry supplier typically comes to €25–30 before shipping — more than a set, for more chemistry than a first year of printing needs. Loose salts start paying off later, when you print enough to buy by the half-kilo. For a first setup, the two-bottle set listed on the cyanotype beginner setup is the simpler and usually the cheaper way in.

The sensitizer soaks into the sheet and becomes part of it, so the paper decides how deep the blue goes and whether the image survives the wash. The budget standard among people who print regularly is a 300 g watercolour pad — €8–11 for 30 A4 sheets — heavy enough to sit through a five-to-ten-minute cold rinse without falling apart, absorbent enough for dense blues. Bargain-bin paper is the one false economy in the whole setup: prints on no-name discount sheets come out blotchy and grainy, and the chemistry usually gets the blame.

Two traps hide in the paper aisle. Many sheets marketed as acid-free are alkaline-buffered, and that buffer attacks Prussian blue — fighting pale prints caused by the paper itself is one of the classic cyanotype beginner mistakes. And the dedicated alt-process papers — unbuffered, 100% cotton — cost around €2 per sheet, six times the budget pad. They are a real upgrade, but one that makes sense after your exposures are consistent, when a ruined sheet is the exception rather than the tuition.

The one specialist-looking tool in cyanotype — the contact frame that presses a negative or a fern flat against the paper — is the easiest cost to delete. Plain glass over a clipboard, held with binder clips, does the same job. Printers pull that glass out of second-hand and discount-store picture frames, or have a small sheet cut at a local glass shop for a few euros; plain float glass is about as cheap as materials get.

The only glass to avoid is the kind sold on being protective. UV-filtering museum and conservation glazing blocks exactly the light the print needs, and some modern window and car glass is treated the same way — printers have watched exposures fail under a pane bought specially for the job. The cheap frame glass is, for once, the right choice: basic float glass passes enough UV for normal exposures.