I'm excited at the moment by the new growth. I took my usual early morning walk through the Gwydir forest with our two dogs, and could no longer resist the temptation to start plucking at leaves to press.

I brought the foliage back to the studio and have pressed them in a beautiful vintage flower press. When they are properly flat and dry I'll be able to use them for photograms. Some of the earliest photographers employed this method of contact printing.

A selection of foliage from the Gwydir forest, ready to be pressed.

If your interested in learning about cyanotypes as an alternative print process there are plenty of You Tube video tutorials and specialist websites out there. But I am going to champion one photographer in particular. Anna Atkins was one of the earliest pioneers of the process, hugely accomplished and frequently over-shadowed by her contemporaries, such as Fox Talbot (they were in fact good friends) and John Herchel. Anna mastered the art of cyanotype printing and self-published her work in 1843 in a book entitled Photographs of British Algae: with hand written notes it was considered the first book of photographic images to have been published.

So there we are, a little bit of photographic history and possibly something to aspire to!