Phenidone-Ascorbic acid - third film in the developer

                              Camera Canon EOS 50e, kit lens 28-80mm
                              Film Kodal Gold 100 C41, unaltered recipe.

Development time based on a baseline for std. B/W film ca 8,5 minutes, compensated for C41 film (ca 25% longer time, and a 6,5% longer time per film through the developer)
8,5 minutes x 1.25 x 1 x 1.065 x 1.065 for a total of 12 minutes @ 20 centigrade

Triplet exposed a box speed, -1 ISO and +1 ISO

Box speed, straight scan, no postprocessing

Box speed, enhanched 1 step

-1 ISO, straight scan, no postprocessing

+1 ISO, straight scan, no postprocessing.

Triplet exposed a box speed, -1 ISO and +1 ISO

This looks quite good, what now matters is how many films we can develop in the mix.

Small matter remaining is the fact that we do not get true blacks with this recipe, we get scannable negatives, but the film leader, fully exposesd to light and developed at the same time as the negatives does not get BLACK, I'm niot quite sure if that matters, it keeps the contrast down to a certain degree, but I think the overall results will be better if we manage to get true blacks.

Feedback from Michael who championed this early on indicates that Gainers early work has been supplanted by a stronger mix, which should give rich blacks and a more films through the developer.

Michael stated that instead of a ratio of 1:100 between Ascorbic acid and Phenidone, it should be replaced with a ratio of 1:40, this being the "sweet spot".  So in the name of science more Phenidone will be added.

Phenidone & Ilford FP4 - second film in this developer

I had this camera, bought chep in an "antiques" store back in the 1970's, a Certo Durata II, fitted with a Meyer Trioplan lens and a simple shutter. At the time I knew nothing about this camera, except that I wanted a folder. At the time I was considered to be a lunatic, I already had 3 Canon SLR bodies, and wanted an outdated, old fashiomned folder?

Foolishly enough I sold it, or rather gave it away for a pittance to a collector many moons ago. (That Trioplan lens annoyed me too, I had learned that Certo fitted them with proper Zeiss Tessars also, I got a copy of Abring's book : "von daguerre bis heute", where 5000 cameras where listed.....

Long story short, about a year ago I found another Durata, this time with the good lens, Tessar 2,8/50 and the good shutter, and I've given it a spin.

I found my old bulk loader, for reloading 35mm casettes, still containing about 50 feet of very, very old FP4 that has survived in haphazard storage conditions maybe since I got the original Durata. This film, the FP4 has been tried out with caffenol, and developed just fiine in C-CM with 1 g/L KBr, virtually no fogging.

I decided to try this film with the new developer and here are the prelimnary results :

Certo Durata, CZ Tessar f:2,8/50 Ilford FP4
developed 9 minutes @ 20 centigrade

The time was guesstimated from a baseline of 8,5 minutes for first film through the developer, adding 6,5% development time per film through the mix.
The mix in question was phenidone/ascorbate with soda :

Soda  (anhydrous)         5,77 gram
Ascorbic acid powder   2,11 gram
Phenidone                     0,0215 gram

Negatives came out just good, looks like this is correct development time, but there is a problem getting the blacks, even the leader, totattly exposed to light when loading/reloading the film is not totally black it CAN be seen throuh it, in that respect this developer is a bit on the weak side.

On the strong side is the fact that the tone scale is fine, grain is fine and the film is sharp, contrast is better than most caffenol mixes I've seen.
Hoiwever, one fly in the oinment, concerning this old and VERY! outdated film, there is sløight fogging. Nothing too bad, but an overall layer of fog, this takes the contrast down a notch with this particular film. I have no reason yet to believe that fogging will be a problem, others have tried Fomapan and T-max and I've seen the negatives. Sweet.

The pictures :

Straight scan FP4 9min @ 20C

Slightly underexposed

Same picture, enhanced contrast, less saturation

Straight scan

Enhanched 1 step

Straight scan

Enhanced 1 step

First results with Phenidone/Ascorbate developer and learning to use it.

My first experiments with this developer resulted in underdeveloped films.
To demontrate what it looks like I'll post these images here.

Take a look at the shadows. There is no details in the shadows. The highlights have some details, but not like it should be. The tonal scale is somewhat strange. Not directly short, but there is something missing. Grains are also visible. All kinds of microscopic dust shows up so to make a half-decent image it takes a lot of cloning away dust spots.

I tweaked the settings of the scanner in all ways to make some useable scans.


This image is captured on a Kentmere 400 film, shot at ISO 400.
Take a look at the shadows. No details!


This is a crop from the previous image.
Here it is easier to see that the shadows lacks details.

I have use an unsharp mask to increase sharpness. This makes the grains and scanner artifacts more visible.

The images are useable, but not perfect.
This is the results from thin and underdeveloped negatives.

You can get this from using any developer, including Caffenol and this one.

Michael mentiones that the activity in this blend is a bit off the sweetspot, so the development times is a bit longer than anticipated.

In addition to this, I used the temperature-time correction chart at Digitaltruth to correct development time for 23C instead of 20C. It seems that this chart isn't correct for this film and this developer. Reading Kodaks charts reveals that they are different for each film and developer. Both time differences and slope of the curve varies from film type to film type.

Increasing development baseline time from 6.5 minutes to 8.5 minutes and NOT correcting for 22C temperature gave me the close to perfect negatives for the images I posted earlier today.
Not correcting for temperature will give about 0.4 stops push according to the time-temp chart and push-processing tables. Looking at the negatives I will say that it may be about 0.2 stops push. Nothing to worry too much about with other words.

This image is from the last fil through the developer. Take a look at the shadow details in this image. There is a lot more detail in the shadows. The scanner software was not tweaked in any way to get this image. Just set white and black points. Turned down brightness just a tad.
The image has much better tonality and the grains are quite fine. The scanner hasn't generated any strange artifacts caused by a thin negative. All in all a much better result.

Some small adjustments now, and we have a real good developer.

More tests.

Using the same phenidone/ascrobate developer as as Erik, I adjusted start time to 8.5 minutes and got great results.
I haven'thad time to scan many images yeet, but the few I have scanned shows that I am about spot on with Fomapan 100 exposed at ISO 100, developed for 8.5 minutes + correction for being film number 6 through the developer. Temperature was 22C instead of 20C, so I expected the negatives to be a tiny bit denser than optimal, and I was right. It is so close to perfect that it doesn't really matter, but we are striving for the perfect, aren't we?

This sample triplet is scanned as one image. Just set the correct white and black points. Nothing further done with brightness or contrast.



Camera used is an old Werra 3 with 50mm f2.8 Carls Zeiss lens. 1/30 sec. f2.8 to f5.6.
The leftmost image is exposed +1EV according to the metered light. In the middle -1EV, and to the right just as the meter said.

In my opinion the development is about right on. In the middle image the shadows has lost some detail and the image to the left has less details in the highlights.
There might be neccessary to do some small adjustments in devlopment time for temperature correction. This would make the "correct" exposed image somewhere between the middle and the rightmost image. That would be absolutely perfect.

Phenidone/Ascorbate

It's been a while since Michael first wrote a piece about phenidone developers here.
He strongly urged me to try this, and a few months back I secured 100 gram of the good stuff.  However unforeseen events on the national level that impackted me / my family took the drive away from doing experiments, we had more than enough with getting back to a normal life after tre tragic bombing & shooting here this summer.
But life goes on and I was also fortunate enough to connect with amnother photographer living here, that has started doing caffenol. We got together, swapped stories & experience (and a couple of cameras, collectors are like stamp collectors, there are always a duplicate in a dark corner....).
I suggested he band together with me in an experiment I've been contemplating, and here goes.

We have decided to share the burden and split the mix between us, so that we test separate films, this way we will be able to build experience quickly.

The plan is to test out 4 or 5 different recipes, developers based on Vitamin C and Phenidone, based on different types of alkali.  Up until now I does the mixing and have control over the recipes, but Trond is the more active testing the stuff quickly and prescisely, making valuable observations and reporting back.

He was the first out of the starting blocks, with a Foma 100 film, and have shown pictures on Flickr, hopefully they will be shown here in a few days.

The recipe so far is based on Patrick Gainers work, adapted and tweaked a little, to adapt to what is available here.

Michael - cowriter on this blog, also have a recipe shared here, it will also be tested by us, so we have cross-references.

The first recipe is very simple :

Washing soda (anhydr.)          5,71 gram
Ascorbic Acid                         2,11 gram
Phenidone                                0, 021 gram

This is broadly what Gainer termed his Standard recipe, what we should call it, I call it
FenoBate 52.002  which gives me a hint on the recipe used, but the name is not important, I'm standing on gainer's shoulders here, he is the inventor.

What is interesting and should be noted is that the whole idea here is very simple :

This is a stock developer to be used many times, developing time increased after every use, like good 'ol D76.  Instead of using Sodium Sulphite to protect the developing agent from oxidizing, one of the developing agents themselves, namely Ascorbic Acid does that, as long as it is present in excess in the solution, phenidone is protected, the rest of it is very simple Ascorbic Acid is hydrolysed into Sodium Ascorbate by the Soda, just like Caffenol, and the soda secured a basic working environment, like caffenol.
Developing time has been the only small problem, it was suggested to use the same time as D76, this has turned out to being a little imprescise. opne problem here might be that Kodak themselves altered D76 times a few years back, creating uncertainity.

First test was Trond with Fomapan 100, exposed at box speed with a some frames exposed 1 step over and one step under.

His exact data and pictures will be incvluded here.............

My first try was  was Kodak Gold 200 which is a C41 color film, my usual test vehicle.

Since Tronds experince from the first film suggest that he should have given the film a little longer time, I adjusrted the base time accordingly.

Base time B&W film (2. test)   9 minutes @ 20 C
Adjusted for C41 film (experience from Caffenol here)  12 minutes @ 20 C

Standard agitation regime, slow inversions for the first minute, with vigorous shaking to expel any air bubbles, then 3 slow inversions per minute at the top of the minute hand.

Stop bath : 2 changes of clean, plain water, NOT acidic stop bath for a soda-based developer!

Standard fix in a rapidfixer, and normal wash.

Make a careful note : this developer has no restraining agent, no anti-foggant and does not need one, so far  (Fomapan, Gold 200, Shanghai 100, Ilford FP4 so far)

The result from my first film, Kodak Gold 200 :

Simple unaltered scan of 3 negatives, from left to right :

Box speed (200 ISO), 1 stop under, 1 stop over

To me it seems Box speed and 1 stop over is best, indicating a slight over-development.

The 3 pictures in detail  :

Straight scan, box speed (200 ISO) 9 min @ 20 C

Same exposure, contrast and saturation enhanched 1 step

 

Underexposure one step :

Straight scan, 1 step underexposure (400 ISO) 9 min @ 20 C

Same exposure, contrast and saturation enhanched 1 step

 

Overexposure 1 step

Straight scan, 1 step overexposure (100 ISO) 9 min @ 20 C

Same exposure, contrast and saturation enhanched 1 step

Some more picture triplets :

Traditional Soda-based recipes

I've been researching a little; how was developers, before developers was sold?

Back in the day people would buy glass plates or contact papers to the same size as their large negatives and make pictures. Since there was no photographers around in sparsely populated areas, people was supposed to do their own, and mix their own. Luckily since photography was invented and since people used a lot of what is now considered strange chemicals to do house chores, it was easy to find the basic chemicals. And there where druggists, or apotecharies who sold medicine, who quickly filled the need and supplied those special chemicals needed for film and paper development.

But where did they get the necessary recipes?  Dead simple, it was meticulously printed on every box for the glass plates or the photo paper.  In connection with a project for the local history chapter I've been scanning some old glass plate negatives. Some of those plates where still in their old boxes, and on the boxes was printed developer recipes.

Those I will share here.

The developers was soda based, because that was a common household chemical I believe, and used Metol, Hydroquinone or staining developers like Pyrogallol.  These was the early, stalwarth stuff they got by with, and frankly they didn't need extremely advanced stuff either, given the negative size they worked with.

Looking at the negatives and the scans I can see that when the old guys guessed exposure right, this worked very well for them, they got good developed negatives with good contrast and long tone scale with ample details in the shadows.

Since this was back in the pre-panchromatic days, this was done by tray development, and hence constant agitation, probably in a matter of minutes only.  These guys lived by the old adage "expose for the shadows, and develop for the highlights, and did so by inspecting each and every plate during development. This is probably why so few are hopelessly under-developed.

Fisrst a recipe on an old glass negative box :

Imperial Dry plate Company, Ltd of London

Here is offered two recipes and advice of how to use them for both under and over-exposure.

The Pyro-Soda developer is stated to be used for correct and full exposures, I think that translates to box ISO and plus one stop today.

The Standard developer i stated suitable to general snapshots and under-exposures, I think that translates to box speed and minus one stop today.

Or simply stated the Standard developer here is the more active, while the Pyro-Soda developer could possibly be a softer working, more fine grained recipe.

Measures is given in English and French measures which would be british and metric measures today and are equivalent.

Recipe,    Imperial Pyro-Soda

Dissolve chemicals in the order given

 

Stock solution

Potassium metabisulphite  10  gram

Pyrogallic Acid                  83  gram

Potassium bromide            13  gram

Water to    1000 ml

     

From this stock solution one mixes

Part 1

Stock Solution                            150 ml

Water (boiled or distilled)    to   1000 ml 

Part 2

Sodium Sulphite                         100 gram

Sodium carbonate                       100 gram

Water (boiled or distilled)  to    1000 ml

In use  mix one part 1 with one part 2. For underexposure increase part 2, for overexposure increase part 1.

Metric measures translates to these british measures :

Stock solution

Potassium metabisulphite 50 grain

Pyrogallic Acid 1 oz

Potassium bromide 60 grain

Water to 22 oz

From this stock solution one mixes

Part 1

Stock Solution 3 oz

Water (boiled or distilled) to 20 oz

Part 2

Sodium Sulphite 2 oz

Sodium carbonate 2 oz
Water (boiled or distilled) to 20 oz

In use mix one part 1 with one part 2. For underexposure increase part 2, for overexposure increase part 1.

***************************

Personally I think this could be translated to caffenol, if one replaces the Pyrogallic acid with Instant Coffe and tries that, but at this point this is pure speculation.

____________________________________________________

Recipe  Imperial Standard
Dissolve chemicals in the order given


Part 1
Metol                                      5 gram
Potassium Metabisulphite       14 gram
Pyrogallic Acid                        6 gram
Potassium bromide                  2 gram
Water (boiled or distilled) to   1000 ml
              
Part 2
Sodium Carbonate                  200 gram
Water (boiled or distilled) to   1000 ml
In use mix one part 1 with one part 2


Metric measures translates to these british measures :

Part 1

Metol                                  45 grain
Potassium Metabisulphite   120 grain
Pyrogallic Acid                    55 grain
Potassium bromide              20 grain
Water (boiled or distilled) to  20 oz

Part 2
Sodium Carbonate                    4 oz
Water (boiled or distilled) to     20 oz

In use mix one part 1 with one part 2


***********************

Personally I think this could be translated to caffenol, if one replaces the Pyrogallic acid with Instant Coffe  and replaces Metol with ascorbic acid, and tries that, but at this point this is pure speculation.



If one chooses to try this, make a note that the standard recipe when translated to Caffeine, stores better than the pyro-soda recipe, because the ascorbic acid in part 1 protects the instant coffe from oxydation. But also note that instant coffe as always is the weak link in all the Caffeine recipes, coffe is no chemical, it is a wildly variating mixtore of substances that we have no control over, that contains degradable foodstuffs and those will quickly go sour as all coffe drinkers know.

However this trip back a century in time or so is a valuable insight into how they did things back in the days, soda based developer is nothing new, on the contrary they once was the base and foundation that photography was built upon. These developers also was what guys like Patric Gainer was looking at, no doubt, when the alternative developers first surfaced some 20 years ago.

In closing a quick look at the fixer mentioned here :

Acid Fixer solution :

Sodium Hyposulphite            500 gram

Potassium metabisulphite         60 gram
Water (boiled or distilled)  to 2500 ml

Metric measures translates to these british measures :


Sodium Hyposulphite     1 lb
Potassium metabisulphite  2 oz
Water (boiled or distilled)  50 oz,

Since a soda based developer combined with an acid fixer can give rise to spots in the emulsion, at least the soda from the developer needs to be watered out by 3 changes of plain water as a stop bath, instead of a traditional stop bath.

Note a plain, non-acidic fixer can be made simply by not adding metrabisulphite, this might be preferred



More will follow

Phenidone-C Developers - I've Learned A Few Things

I've been tweaking my phenidone/c developers recently and learned a few interesting things so I thought I would share.  Here are some quick points:

1. The amount of phenidone is directly proportional to developer activity.  Using PCB (19g borax + 6g ascorbic acid + 0.15g phenidone + water to 1L) as an example, reducing the phenidone from 0.15g/L to 0.1g/L makes a huge difference in developer activity.
2. The more phendone/c you have, the lower pH you need for active development.  I discovered that with enough phenidone/c you can have very active development at a pH of 7.2.  On the other extreme, you can use ridiculously small quantities of phenidone/c (e.g. PCM uses 0.8g/L ascorbic acid +  0.02g/L phenidone) but increase pH for similar activity.  This means you can adjust the activity of phenidone/c developers either by varying the pH or the amount of ingredients.
3. More vit-c doesn't make much difference in activity but does extend shelf life.  For example, using ascorbic acid at 4g/L vs 8g/L shows no discernable difference in activity but makes a re-usable developer last longer.
4. pH does not affect grain very much.  Grain from developers at pH 8.4 and 9.6 look very similar.  This is based on observations with a scanner and RC prints.
5. Stand development doesn't work the way we think.  Testing showed no significant difference between full stand development (60s initial continuous only) vs minimal agitation (60s initial continuous, 10s every 5 mins) except for time when using a very dilute developer (PCM).  Agitation more frequent than 5 mins showed more highlight development and increased contrast.
6. You really don't need much potassium bromide.  Even without potassium bromide, fog is minimal (most won't notice it), but adding 0.04g/L clears it up with no effect on developer activity.

If you like to concoct developers as I do I hope you find this useful.

MM

TCB - Trouble In Paradise

I've been playing with p-aminophenol developers again.  I found that parodinal + ascorbate + borax (RCB) makes for a fine grain full speed developer.  I also found that substituting ascorbate for sulfite in parodinal works too (TCB).  However, doing side-by-side tests as a one-shot developer, I find that I need twice as much ascrobate-parodinal as I do sulfite-parodinal to get the same level of activity.  This bugs me a bit as ascorbate-parodinal is half as efficient as sulfite-parodinal which means I'm wasting a fair amount of  ingredients.

Activity levels aside, the visible difference between the two is the formation of long needle-like crystals in the sulfite version and not in the ascorbate one.  I don't know what the crystals are but if they are p-aminophenol that means that sulfite-parodinal is super-saturated while ascorbate-parodinal is not which would explain the difference in activity levels.  Could it be that the conversion of acetaminophen to p-aminophenol needs sulfite to complete?

I have nothing against sulfite and it's something I stock anyway as I use it in my fix.  I'm just curious about the chemical process here so I can better understand what is going on.  I am not a chemist in any way so I'm hoping to learn from others with more knowledge about this.

MM

Phenidone-C Divided Developer - Strangeness

I've been toying with the idea of a Phenidone-C divided developer akin to divided D-76 or Diafine.  Based on my experience with Phenidone-C so far, I propose the following formula:


Part A
Ascorbic Acid - 80g
Sodium Bicarbonate - 60g
Water - 750mL (make sure all is dissolved and effervescence stops)
Phenidone - 1g
Water to make 1L

Part B
Sodium Hydroxide - 1.45g
Borax - 6.92g
Water to make 1L

Agitate for 5 mins in part A then 5 mins in part B.

I did a quick test with the recipe scaled down to 100mL and use film clips to get an indication of activity.  What I expected to happen and what actually happened really surprised me.  I expected there to be no visible evidence of development in part A while the ascorbate + phenidone soaked into the emulsion and expected all the development to be visible when in part B.  To my surprise, after about 1 min in part A I noticed a slight darkening of the film and after two mins it was nearly black.  I thought I was going nuts here as everything I read and experienced showed that you need a higher pH to get decent activity out of Phenidone-C.  The time in part A is within range of a normal 8-10 min developer.  I thought I may have contaminated part A and increased the pH so I checked it with a calibrated meter and it showed 7.2 ... about what I expected being near neutral.  Now this is confusing ... ascorbate developing at a pH of 7.2?  I still don't believe it but I ran the same test 3 times with the same result.  I have no idea what's going on here and cannot explain it.  On the plus side I'm thinking with the really low pH this very concentrated phenidone-c-bicarbonate mix could be an extremely fine grained re-usable developer.

On one hand this really complicates my idea for a two part phenidone-c developer but on the other hand I may have stumbled across a new unexpected developer.

Next step is to actually process film instead of test clips to see real world results.  I propose two initial tests, one with just part A for 8 mins and one with part A for 2 mins and part B for 6 mins.