Sunday, February 19, 2012

Never give up, keep trying!

I told you about an idea that someone gave me at Flickr. Well, the idea is this you can see here. A two baths developer. First of all I tried the version without coffee. I don't have sodium sulfite, nor sodium bissulfite, nor Potassium Bromide. Searching the internet I found out that the sodium sulfites only prevent the oxidation of CD-4. The idea is to get CD4 soaked in the film layers and then start developing in a basic medium, the sodium carbonate. So, I thought this would work with CD-4 in the first bath and only sodium carbonate in the second, without the developer restrainer Potassium Bromide. Because in this process it is not possible to overdevelop, I gave some 10 minutes each bath, then I bleached and fixed as usual. The film was fast completely transparent and don't ask me why

Then I decided to use caffenol as the second bath, and I got a better result. Finally I added some 5 ml of the 5% solution of CD-4 to the caffenol, maintaining the first bath of CD-4 alone. The result reached now fast the point where I was working with the Tetenal solution and coffee.

This result gave me the suspection that maybe my 5% solution is stronger than Tetenal's one. To be checked tomorrow, trying to develop without the first bath but with less CD-4 with the Caffenol.

All three pre-soaked in CD-4, the first developed only with Soda, the second with soda and coffee, the third with soda coffee and a little CD-4
Photo from the second negative
Photo from the third negative

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