Monday, March 18, 2019

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).

6 comments:

Jason said...

FYI: This recipe does not work with Foma Retropan 320. Negatives exhibited _massive_ dichroic fogging and at least five stops underexposure. (I developed a 35mm test strip.) To be fair, I've had mixed experiences with developing Retropan 320, but I wanted to see how it would behave with this recipe.

Henrique Sousa said...

Which Carbonate did you use? The recipe is for anhydrous. So, you may have to increase the amount when using hydrated Carbonate. Try another strip.
Thanks for the comment

Vasile Guta-Ciucur said...

Well, what about dozing the recipe for the non-anhydrous Carbonate? I mean, for ingredients easy to find by anyone.

Henrique Sousa said...

3 g of anhydrous Sodium Carbonate may be replaced with 6.6 g of heptahydrated Sodium Carbonate.
Thanks for the suggestion! Post is updated.

James the Thickheaded said...

So no Ascorbic Acid?

Robert W. said...

You can also simply fry your sodium carbonate in a frying pan on high (there is no danger of burning) to restore it to anhydrous. When it stops behaving like a fluid and more like a powder it's anhydrous. You can also do this to sodium bicarbonate to change it to sodium carbonate.