Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Salt as a fixer is spreading

As soon as March 2012, I rediscovered salt as a possible alternative to known thiosulfates fixers.

A 300g/l solution of salt will fix normal B&W films in about 24 hours.

After that date, I started a series of tests in order to make the salt fixer faster.

I came to the conclusion that adding 2ml/liter of a 5% solution of household ammonia to the salt fixer, the time is reduced to as few as 2 hours. In this recipe I also included 2g/l of Potassium Bromide which also contributes to the speeding of the salt fixer. But it may be left away, if time may be longer than 2 hours, let us say 4 hours. Also Potassium Bromide is not a household stuff and this is actually the aim of the thing, no need of expensive products and hard to get!

It is already 5 years ago that I published the 'finding' and slowly this is spreading away.

Early recognized by the Caffenol Master Reinhold, that promoted some discussions about it in forums,  I am glad to see that my modest contribute to homemade film development is beeing announced here and there. I found it today at the fine blog of Profesora G. J. Yukavetsky.

My compliments and special thanks!

3 comments:

J. M. Golding said...

Thank you for the information, Henrique! I had no idea, and that's fascinating.

Henrique Sousa said...

Hi, Jacki! Glad to see you here!

I always wondered that people is using alternative homemade developers like Tea, Coffee, Wine and so on, forgetting the fixer. That was my motivation for this and some search on earlier processes led me to salt.

Cheers!

Vodun said...

Preparing my first attempt at a "Caffenol" development, I knew there must be a way to fix without the use of branded, specialized product. Otherwise how could photography have carried on in the past?

Grateful for you sharing the salt fixer concept and recipe and this update. After all, if we cannot wait a few hours, then why are we shooting film in this decade to begin with!