The overwhelming success of digital media and digital photography have left afficinados of traditional methods hanging....... by their fingernails.
There are still millions of perfedctly useable cameras out there.
Hundreds of thousands of enlargers, developing tanks.
Films are still selling by millions, photograpic paper, developers, fixers are still produced and sold.
BUT. Its getting increasingly difficult to FIND stuff. Personally I live in a small community, just a few years ago, there was two separate labs with one-hour service, films, chemicals and tools could still be bought, there was 2 - 3 professional photographers that also ran traditional photo shops where cameras, parapnerlia, chemicals, photoalbums and loads of stuff could be found.
Today all of this is gone, both photograpers have closed shop, the labs are long gone, no chemicals at all are available, instead we have to eolectronics shops that has a mini-wall of didgital cameras, and one photographer that sells digital cameras, and offers wedding and portrait photography. Also a few films are available on a minihanger on one wall, 135 and APS only, together with a few disposable cameras.
Noone can fing chemicals, and anything except mass-market stuff has to be mailed in, bought from the Net, where €bay seems to be the main source.
In this environment I last year took up the daunting challenge of once more using and developing my own films.
From the word get go I realized that even finding the traditional develpoers I once used tio use was a challenge, and most likely going to be a slippery slope, the manufacturers are bound to close shop and disappear evene faster than film manufacturers.
Therefore I set my sights on Kaffenol, especially after I discovered Reinhold's blog, who had better and more dependable recipes than what is found elsewhere.
I picked up from there and have decided to take part in the challenge of making a dependable and useable developer out of the chaos reported on US net-sites as far as kaffenol goes.
Welcome aboard, I will in the future present my experiments and show results, and hopefully so will others.
