Caffenol Strong, new findings

Some days ago I developed a 120 B&W film in the recipe that I called Caffenol Strong. If you are following this blog, please see 2 posts earlier. I forgot adding KBr (potassium bromide) and the result was a very dense and foggy negative. Some of the photos could still be saved, like the following:

Old windmill

The color is the inverse of the negative blueish color, maybe automatically tonned by scanner or software. The fact is that this Caffenol gives, with Fomapan film, a «sepia» or, if you wish, a coffee stained positive image.

The amount of KBr is crucial for both avoiding fog and accutance of the photos. Also the developing time is considerably influenced by this amount. I have been using 1 g/liter of KBr but today I decided to use just 0,5g/liter to have a decent development time of less than one hour.

I am still waiting for the film to be fixed with common salt (sodium chloride) because the ammonium thiosulfate is producing strange white spots (black in negative). Salt fixing takes a long time, some hours depending on temperature and concentration. The film is now clear after 3 hours but needs 3 hours more to be considered fixed. I hope I can show the results of Caffenol Strong + Salt in the next post.

Building a rig to make macros of slides or negatives

One of the problems with the scanners is the time you need to scan a single picture, even at low resolution. The digital camera, a not so bad one like my Sony A290, is able to reproduce slides and negatives with acceptable quality and very quick. Yes, I know, there are a kind of tubes with a macro lens for that, but I wanted more control on the process. So, I made the rig below:

The rig to reproduce slides and negatives

On the right side you may see the scanner Epson V500 used to reproduce the slide below. It is more sharp than the one made with the rig, but that could be my fault. The scanned build took quite a long time to scan at 1200 dpi. The camera made the reproduction in a fraction of second and the image is similar to a 2400 dpi with the sacanner. The colors are better and durst was more filtered than with the scanner.

Scanned with Epson V500

Macro made with a Sony A290

Finally, the rig was made up from a standard cheap slide rule bought at ebay and some pieces of iron and wood and screws. The backlight is from a led array for photography.

Caffenol Strong

Some months ago I was trying to make a Caffenol two-bath developer like I did with Parodinal+Vit C. Starting point was equal amounts of coffee and Vit. C as bath A and then soda + potassium bromide as bath B. Before having some result I had to go on increasing coffee and vit. C concentration of the bath A until I reached 200g/liter each. But then, I realized that the amount of bath A transported into bath B was as little as 10ml/Liter. So I tought, why not adding the 10 ml of that solution directly  to the soda bath. So I did and the result was as expected, this developer worked in about 30 minutes at 20ºC.

Some days ago, I remembered I still have some bottles of bath A, made some months ago. The developer was still good, which means it can be stored for several months (I added some grams of sodium sulfite as preservative too).

One of the pictures shot last weekend and developed in Caffenol Strong, the name I gave to this weak/strong developer.

Amazing is that the negative has a blueish color that, inverted, resembles coffee stain in the positive image (maybe a question of film too). The other advantage is a pH about 10,8 with very long developing time and, as far as I can observe, very fine grain compared with other relatives.
Recipe:
Bath A - dissolve 5 g/L of sodium or potassium sulfite or metabisulfite; add 200g coffee and 200g Vit. C and stir. Let stand until the foam vanish.
Bath B - 50g/L sodium carbonate + 1g/L potassium bromide
Work solution: 10ml of bath A in 1 L bath B or equivalent.
Developing time is about 30 minutes at 20ºC with Fomapan 100 ISO. 
If one uses only 500 ml of this developer it will contain 1g coffee and 1 g Vit C.
This is almost a miracle, isn't it? Like the 1L car of Volkswagen. 

And so this is Winter

The time is not so nice for pictures and I have been in the USA where the winter is much more interesting, with snow and so on.

Here in Portugal it is wetter, cold, high humidity and not so nice to go around and take pictures. But sometimes we have a kind of Springy days with blue sky, inviting for taking pictures outside.

Be patient, now, because I brought a splendid camera and lens from USA, a Leica R3 made in... Portugal with a Summicron lens f/2 50mm from Leitz Wetzlar. I didn´t use it until today. But who knows, tomorrow...

Fireplace and photo

I have a fireplace where normally I burn firewood. Now, because it is better, I am using pellets. For this, I only had to put an iron mesh at the bottom to prevent the pellets fall to the ash tray too soon. Well, it works very well, at last I am free from the gas supplier, the only source of energy I depend upon is electricity, my car is electric too and made in Portugal.

This allows me to use the cheap nightly electricity to heat water and to charge the batteries of the car. But today, and that is the reason of this post, before I through away the ash of the fireplace, I decided to wash it in a basin. Then I measured the pH of the washing water and it was above 12. I filtered the water with coffee filter. Then I thought this water could serve as a basic medium to develop photo film or paper. Indeed it worked! I have tested with coffee+vitC added to that water and keeping the pH hight enough, around 11.

So, if you can't find washing soda at your drugstore, try this method with wood ashes from your fireplace. Important here is to keep the pH high enough, I don't know how concentrated the solution was and by now, I used a 1:1 solution of coffee and vit C dropped in the ash washing water and it turned a piece of photo paper black in some 10 minutes.

The next I am going to shoot and develop with ash, coffee and vit C.

A bellows camera made by myself

I started making the bellows, the most difficult part. I didn't know whether I could pass this step successfully and perhaps would need to buy one at ebay. But it did work satisfactorily. Then I took a wooden box and transformed it to the camera body. The cover of the box served as lensboard. With aluminum profiles I made the sliding rails for the plates and the monorail focusing system. Here a paper spring holder cares about the necessary sliding friction and position fixing. As a separate piece I made a guilhotine shutter using also a ring from a broken Konica as lens adapter with 3 screws to fix the 55 mm lens tube. The lens were taken from a binocular.

I also made a ground glass, a plate holder (I am using paper) and a pistol grip to prevent flickering during shutter operation. The shutter may be operated trough a normal shutter release cable and we may also use a timer like shown in the film bellow.

If you have interest in the plans of this camera, please leave your contact.

Following the past of photography

The first successful photographic processes used metal or paper as base for the negative image that resulted directly from the exposure of their surfaces to light. On the case of the daguerreotypes, the positive was a result of the mirror effect of the negative image on the copper silver plated surface. The copper was polished until you could see your face reflected on it and then plated with a very thin silver layer which was then sensitized by exposition in darkness to iodine vapours. The sensitized plate was exposed for some few minutes to light and developed with mercury vapours or, latter, with the Becquerel method of exposition to sun light through a red filter. I don't know much about Talbot's methode but it used paper for the negative, like we can read here. And John Herschel made the first transparent negative on glass as early as 1839 but its general usage started some time latter on the 1850's. The first transparent plastic film was produced in 1889.

What I want to say is that transparent negative film is an invention that follows the opaque bases for negatives, metal or paper. Even the first flexible photographic roll film made by Eastman Kodak in 1885, was actually coated on paper.

The need of transparent bases for the negative was primarily to allow reproduction by the same methode used for the negative. A paper negative, due to the structure of the paper, gives worst positives than those made with a transparent support. This is more or less obvious. What is difficult to understand is that film remained a standard until today, even tought that the reproduction techniques such as normal scanners are not conceived to give good and fast reproductions of a transparency. They can reproduce paper prints and daguerreotypes much better than transparencies.

The photos below were made with a bellows camera made by my self, using a lens from a cheap binocular, on Ilford paper, Multigrade IV brilliant. Exposisions between 10 and 30 seconds at a 20 W fluorescent light at home. No shutter, just a cover which is removed and placed back manually.

The paper has some advantages over film. It is less delicate, can be handled without extreme care. It does not attract dust as easily as film. It is also more resistent and can be archived in shoeboxes or in albuns. I think that it would be a great thing if some manufacturer offers 'paper film' at least in medium format.  The paper should be thinner than the regular photo paper and can do more photos than the film because it will consist on just paper and not paper + film like the 120 rolls.