Hair dye instead of CD-4

Today I decided to try almost every possible combinations of developers without CD-4 that might give some encouraging result. Coffee, lots of coffee, like I did with the salt fixer, but this time nothing happened that could encourage me to go further. With parodinal, different concentrations, etc., and nothing again. Then mixing coffee with parodinal, and Vitamine C and aspirine and green tea, but nothing worked really, only sometimes a very tiny shadow made me suspect it could result, but nothing. Well, looking to the poor photos of the group in Flickr that is making color photos with hair dye that doesn't encourage anyone to go in that direction.

But I was feeling that this day could not finish without a small joy. I had a hair dye kit that I already tried without success, but from the 60ml bottle containing the para-fenilenediamine I only used some 10 ml. It was almost full. I picked it up, turn all the content in a yougurt beaker and complete with water to make 100ml. The liquid alone is thick and not practical to measure.

In another 100ml beaker I putted 2 ml of this solution, water and a tsp sodium carbonate. All on my cookies box stove to keep the mixture warm, about 25 ºC.

I had already a lot of color film slices developed, bleached and fixed, all yelow and transparent, except one where I used the Tetenal developer as recommended and witch serves to show me when a film is really developed. This slice was dark brown.

I cutted a piece of film and let stay for 30 minutes in the hair dye, then bleach and fix. It was dark brown-grey. Aha! It may work, not giving the best results, but something will appear. I loaded a 35mm camera with cheap Lomography film and tried. Yes, something was there in the film. Underdeveloped but I saw after that the ISO was set too high, 160 instead of 100 and the camera was in Auto-mode.

Tomorrow I will be repeating the experiment more carefully and I may add something more to the bath. Guess what? Coffee, of course!

My street

Another view from my flat

 Self-criticism: The film was 100 ISO but, by mistake, exposed if it was 160. Neverthless, the negatives are very usable, a good scanner could make better of them. These photos are macros with the small Olympus FE4050, tunned with GIMP.