Caffenol Black

Caffenol Black is a minimal developer that uses only coffee as developing agent, Sodium Carbonate as accelerator and Sodium Chloride (salt) as restrainer. The recipe is as follows:

10 g soluble coffee

3 g Sodium Carbonate anhydrous or 6.6 g of heptahydrated Sodium Carbonate

2 g Sodium Chloride

Water to make 500 ml

Preparation: Dissolve by the given order in tap water (16-18ºC) and wait some minutes until all graininess is gone. Develop for 90 minutes, agitating each 15 minutes for 1 minute.

And here are some of the results you may expect:

The photos above were taken with a Olympus Trip 35 using Fomapan 100 (bulk).

Coffee as toner for salt prints

Just another experiment!

I am now enthusiastic with salt prints. The look depends on the negative, exposition, paper, coating of the paper, etc..

Here is one of my latest salt print:

The same print after a bath in a 10% solution of coffee, i.e. 10 g soluble coffee for 100 ml water.

I tried to give the scan a very similar look to the original, but it is not 100% identical. I think the original has a better look.

This is my suggestion for your next salt print.

Merry Christmas

Fomapan 100 developed with Caffenol-Black

True sepia, make it simple

The photo above was a normal B&W photo, a little too dark. So, I wondered what could it turn in sepia. To do so, I used a bleach bath made of copper sulfate and sodium chloride for a few minutes, enough to vanish the image. I washed tho photo to remove vestiges of the bleach and soak it in a solution of Sodium Sulfide. The image reappeared but now in sepia.

Bleach:

100 g Copper Sulfate
100 g Sodium Chloride
1 liter water

Sepia bath:

10 g Sodium Sulfide
1 liter water

Salt print

Bridge over Lis, Leiria, Portugal

Salt print is one of the easiest (and earliest) print processes from a transparent negative. But there are a number of slight different recipes and some toning methods.

I did the simplest recipe I could find to produce the A4 picture above:

First I printed the negative on a A4 acetate transparency. Then I prepared the paper using a sheet of A4 Canson paper of 300g/m2. The paper was first floated on a 2% salt solution (20g of salt for 1 liter water) and put the paper to dry. After this, under a red light I painted the paper with a 12% solution of silver nitrate (12g of silver nitrate for 100 mililiter) using a smooth brush and let the paper dry.

Using a photo frame I putted the transparency and paper in contact, with the transparency over the paper when the glass is looking up.

Following this preparation, I exposed the sandwich to bright sun for some minutes, until the sensitized paper looked brown enough.

Finally the paper was taken of the frame and subject to a water shower until the water came clear out.

Then I brought the paper to a tray containing a 10% solution of Sodium Thiosulfate (100g for 1 liter). This step took 20 minutes, The paper was left in water for 1 hour and put to dry.

Wannabe Photographer

Thank you for waiting

Since quite a long time, I found no time to go on with my experiments on color photography. But I have been busy taken pictures and developing and scanning and publishing at Flickr.

After trying Dignan 2-bath method for more than one year, tweaking here and there, developing at room temperature, I may now say that it is a very good idea but it also has disadvantages. The bath A doesn't last that long as the author desired and you have to live with some color shift to green in negatives, magenta in positive.

Last October I came to another approach by Bill Williams, that I tried to simplify creating a 2-solutions color developer, like used in commercial color kits. But I was not so sure whether this would not conduct me at the end to a standard color developer, like many other fans of color film photography do.

So, I prepared 500 ml of a standard color developer that I am using since more than a month (six rolls and still going). I am using the developer with a start temperature of 42ºC (I don't have a JOBO device) and until now the results are very good for me. The recipe may be found here, for instance.

Some results of using the standard color developer: