Good to the last drop: Coffee as developer

[Angus]

If tannin does it...then a nice cup of tea will do the trick!

[David A. Goldfarb]

If you hunt around on the net there's an article by a professor from RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) on coffee and other developers, and I think his class found that a mint infusion was better than coffee or tea. Human urine contains catechol, but I'm not desparate enough to try it.

[S8 Booster]

...... "I have a friend..." who got all her mercury fillings yanked out and replaced with modern fillings. Afterwards she developed symptoms of extreme mercury poisoning; she's still recovering. It seems that filling removal (by drilling) causes much of the remaining mercury to leach out into the body, and when you're 45 years old or so and have already accumulated a lifetime's worth of the stuff, the sudden influx of new mercury can cause severe reactions.

this is a well known problem. there are dentists in here scandinavia (and many other places) which use special ecupment to extract those fumes while drilling the filings.



s8hôôt

[tlatosmd]

Here's one of my 4x5" negs on Efke PL100 developed in caffenol--

http://www.photo.net/bboard/image?bboar ... d=17789684

I really like that one, it looks warm and somehow has some 'punch' to it. An odd mix of surreal, supernatural, and vintage.

I know some 60s b/w PAL TV footage looks like this, with something like semi-transparent shadows on those bright areas giving a more textured, even 3D look to the flatness yet with something like a blurred sharpening halo effect on the outside of these shadows (look at the clouds, that's where it's most obvious). For some reason I associate a warm buzzing sound with it.

Quick update. Just installed Corel Paint Shop Pro X, and it has an effect that looks like what I mean, it's called 'highpass'.

[David A. Goldfarb]

Interesting. Part of what you're seeing is probably just the tonality of an Efke 100 neg, which is really a beautiful still film, and the 3-dimensional look of a 4x5" negative at about its original size.

A caffenol neg looks a lot like a less contrasty version of a neg developed in ABC pyro (Kodak D-1), which was Edward Weston's developer of choice.

Tanning developers like pyrogallol ("pyro") and catechol produce some interesting edge effects, a bit like unsharp masking. A nice pyro neg will often show a strong relief pattern, like the emulsion side of a Kodachrome transparency.

Pyro also adds stain density proportionally to the silver density, so if used properly, it can improve highlight detail.

The downside of ABC pyro (and caffenol) is that it's grainy. The more modern PMK pyro formula (pyro-metol-kodalk), though, uses the stain effect to mask grain, so it might be interesting as a neg developer for small format cine film, if you could convert to positive in a way that mimics the spectal sensitivity of photographic paper (i.e. through a blue filter, or using mainly the blue and green channels before converting to monochrome).

[skahde]

Human urine contains catechol, but I'm not desparate enough to try it.

I imagine it would be hard to achieve a high enouh and controlled concentration.

I'd rather use the coffee before and not after ingesting it. :lol:

Stefan

[audadvnc]

I read somewhere that horse piss was used by some 19th Century photographers. Didn't know the horses drank coffee, though...

[Carlos 8mm]

BTW,
Anybody knows some "three-steps" or less complicate B&W reversal processing? :roll:

[skahde]

BTW,
Anybody knows some "three-steps" or less complicate B&W reversal processing? :roll:

A close friend looked into this for a while but with bw its either more than three steps or nasty and hard to get chemistry which are needed to do the reversal by chemistry rather than second exposure and redevelopment in the same step. In the end the well known processes looked a lot more attractive than before. With colour it's no problem. Tetenal E6 33-bath works like a charm if one one does what manual says.

Stefan

[johnnhud]

BTW,
Anybody knows some "three-steps" or less complicate B&W reversal processing? :roll:

Black and white negative - simplest of all, requires three baths. The first one is the developer, which develops the image from its latent state. The film's silver is darkened proportionately to the amount of light it received during exposure, thus forming a negative image (darker silver corresponds to brighter areas). The second is a stop rinse, which washes the developer away from the film. The third is a fixer, which removes the excess silver that has not been darkened by the developer. Afterwards the film is washed to remove the fixer, which can otherwise stain and fade the film with time.

The films that use this process are Kodak 7231, 7222, Ilford HP-5, FP-4, and SX200. Processing specs are available with the film data (Kodak and Ilford's sites have them). Black and white negative movie processing differs with still film processing primarily in the choice of developer, the lower contrast D-96 is used instead of the classic D-76. It is possible, however, to experiment with different developers.

[audadvnc]

The films that use this process are Kodak 7231, 7222, Ilford HP-5, FP-4, and SX200.

Plus almost any other sensitized silver halide emulsion. Even old Kodachrome II can be processed b&w negative if you're desperate.

Black and white negative movie processing differs with still film processing primarily in the choice of developer, the lower contrast D-96 is used instead of the classic D-76.

Somewhere on the Internet there is a good web page on the history of D-76:
http://silvergrain.org/Photo-Tech/d-76.html
The stuff sold in the yellow bags nowadays is different from the original formula, and more closely resembles D-76d, which is slightly lower contrast, and produces results rather close to D-96 (although they are not the same formula).

[mathis]

In the artists lab in which I´m used to self-develop b/w negative they use D-19. Does anybody know a reference where the differences of all these developer recepies are explained?

[David A. Goldfarb]

There are a number of references for this sort of thing. Plug the name of the formula into google, and you should turn up some of them. One of the better ones is http://www.jackspcs.com.

Books that contain this information include old editions of the Kodak _Photo Lab Manual_, Achell and Troop's _Film Developing Cookbook_, Anchell's _Darkroom Cookbook_, and Grant Haist's _Modern Photographic Processing_.

[chachi]

I tried this a while back using plus-X film in cafenal/washing soda solution and was suprised aswell by how well it looked compared to the D-76 developer. My first attempts are posted in the gallery .
Anyhoo, I still have'nt posted those clips since the ftp site when down around that time aswell..

[Angus]

"I have a friend..." who got all her mercury fillings yanked out and replaced with modern fillings. Afterwards she developed symptoms of extreme mercury poisoning;

Said dentist should be prevented from practising.

That is a *very* widely known risk. Hell I'm no dentist and I've been aware for years that it is safer to leave old mercury fillings in until they come out of their own accord...then it's safer to remove any which are actually loose.

Sounds like a greedy dentist wanting lots of money for un-necessary work.

But hey...what do I know...I didn't visit a dentist for 16 years and when I finally went (to hold the wife's hand as she's afraid of them) he said..."if all my customers were like you I'd be out of a job. Apart from needing a little cleaning your teeth are prefect".

Wonder if drinking coffee then peeing it out works well as a developer?