Maizanol

I went ahead and developed a film in a "tea" made from boiling crushed corn-cobs.


But waitaminute! What is that?


Corn-cobs has many uses, for this purpose its sold by a company called Midway in USA and used for polishing fired gun cartridge cases, to get rid of powder dirt and grime.


This stuff is crushed and graded through industrial sieves and has a grainy structure.


I measured out 50 gram and boiled for 20 -30 minutes in one litre of water.


The resulting "tea" was hydrolysed with 50 gram washing soda, and 15 gram ascorbic acid powder was added as soon as all the soda had disolved.


A clip test indicated that the mixture was a little less than half as active as Liptonol, a developer based on tea from ordinary household tea....


Time in the bath was therefore 40 minutes, followed by ordinary fix and wash.


Negatives are hung to dry, looks a bit less contrasty than Liptonol, maybe on par with Caffenol, but less active than the coffee recipe.


Anxious to see if grain is better or worse than Liptonol.......


Looking forward to scan as soon as the film is dry.


Recipe :

1 litre "tea" from boiling crushed corncobs for 30 minutes.

Water 1 litre
Corncobs, crushed 50 gram
Washing Soda anhydrous 50 gram
ascorbic acid poder 15 gram


Boil the corn for 30 minutes, strain through inert sieve, set to cool.....
Add 50 gram of soda, the color changes and bobbles appear on surface, klet sit for a while...
Add 15 gram of ascorbic acid powder this will really produce bubbles but it subsides quickly, let sit.....



Developing :


Develop for 45 minutes at 20 degrees centigrade, expect low contrast negatives well suited to scanning.



Example :


First test negatives was a film with exposure triplets, 1 at box speed, 2 at -1 stop, 3rd at +1 stop
Developed for 40 minutes, indicated by a clip test that took quite a while longer than expected.


For a first test the result was less than spectacular the negatives show thin, flat negatives with every indication of a slight underdevelopment and underexposure the +1 negatives are best across the board.


This is a triplet :

This triplet is from left to right : 1 Box speed, 2 -1 stop, 3 +1 stop
This image is not altered from scanning.

Here the triplet has been altered by just take a chance, 1-click in Picasa


And this is the +1 ISO negative untouched

And further, this is the +1 negative with the contrast and saturation slightly altered/upped
by just one click on the same 1-click button in Picasa

AS far as I'm concerned this is not a success, but it indicates a roadmap to further tests & improvement

Barkanol ™

I was thinking about alternate developing agents and remembered that tea, the kind you drink, is leaves from a bush. Well, it must be possible to extract some developing agents from other plants and trees.

The tree bark contains a lot of chemical compounds, so maybe some of them will work as a developer?

Well, I dived into the basement and found some burning wood that still had some bark. I selected a species with dark strong smelling bark and carved off about 50g of the bark.

I brought it back to the kitchen and put it into a blender and grinded it into a fine powder.
This was transfered into a pan and boiled with about 500ml of water for little more than an hour.

I filtered the "tea" through a coffe filter and had about 300ml of the dark brown liquid.

Into this I mixed

30g sodium sulfite
30g sodium carbonate
3.5g salicylic acid
7.5g sodium askorbate.

This was diluted to 700ml.

A clip-test was blackened in a little more than 2 minutes, but the temperature was a bit  on the high side.
Correcting for the temperature I estimated a developing time of about 8.5 minutes.

The only testfilm I had for the moment was a PolyPan F exposed at 100 ISO.
That is one step push. Starting a developer test with a one step push development isn't what I prefer, but lacking another exposed film, this was going to be dipped into the developer.

Well, lets run the test and calculate the time for one step push development.
8.5 minutes x 1.4 is about 12 minutes.

Developing for 12 minutes worked out quite well. maybe a tiny bit overdeveloped. The contrast came out a bit on the high side so slightly less development would be perfect.
Grain is fine. About the same as with other fine grain developers.
The developer is ment to be used and reused again. I suppose it is possible to develop at least 12 films per liter developer before it is exhausted. Keeping qualities is unknown, but in short time I will test some chemical to increase lifetime of the developer.

PolyPan F @ 100 ISO.

PolyPan F @ 100 ISO.

Addtional information  March 20. 2012
Testing the Barkanol developer today showed no activity.
I even tried to develop a film with some test exposures. 100ISO B&W film for 12 minutes @ 22c gave almost blank film. Just some faint images can be seen.
I measured the pH and it hadn't changed. Well, something must have changed.
I suspected the developing agent from the bark was dead. This may be closely related to pyrogallol and it may be easily destroyed by oxidation.
To test this I added the equivalent of 0.015g/L of Dimezone-S, a phenidone variant.
This brought the activity back up to about the same as D76. This indicates that the sodium ascorbate is still intact, but the component from the bark is dead as suspected.

With this in mind, this is a developer that may be reused within a day or two, but despite adding several chemicals including Dequest 2010 to prevent destruction of the developing agents, it wasn't successful.
The chenicals has indeed protected the ascobate, but to no avail since the other component is destroyed.

To simplify this developer, the salicylic acid and the sulfite may be left out and the developer may be used as one-shot just as caffenol.

I have done some tests on caffenol using the same chemicals to increase the lifetime of the developer, but the same happens to the caffenol. It dies in a couple of weeks. Adding too much sulfite drops the activity of the developer.

Adding fresh coffe brings it back to life, so the ascorbic acid/sodium ascorbate is still there, so the coffe component dies after some time. Seemingly, neither ascorbic acid or sulfite will protect it from destruction, so mixed caffenol can't be tweaked to allow a reasonable long lifetime.

LOMAD. A Diafine clone.

After two months testing it's time to publish a Diafine clone dubbed LOMAD.
Lazy Old Man's Ascorbic Developer.

Well, you cannot be overly lazy since the second bath requires constant agitation to give good results, but when done properly you don't have to watch the clock with one eye all the time while developing. It doesn't matter if you leave the film in the first bath for 4,5 or 6 minutes. Event 9 or 10 minutes gives you the same result.
The time required in the second bath is 5 minutes, but 6,7,8 or 9 minutes will give the same result.
The temperature may be from 18c to 25c without any change in developing time.

The first bath which contains the developing agents is mixed like this:

700ml water.
15g sodium sulfite
5g sodium metabisulfite
15g sodium ascorbate
0.3g phenidone
0.1g Kbr
1g salicylic acid.
Water to 1000ml.

Sodium ascorbate is used instead of ascorbic acid to avoid the hydrolyzing step to convert ascorbic acid to ascorbate. This will make it more difficult to balance pH at 7.0.

The reason for using both sulfite and metabisulfite is to balance pH at or just below 7.0
My mix came out at pH 6.8

The second bath contains the alkali and the rest of the sulfite.

700ml water.
20g borax
100g sodium sulfite
1g KBr
Water to 1000ml.

Sample pictures:


Lucky 100 at ISO 100.



Lucky 100 at ISO 100.



Lucky 100 at ISO 100.



Shanghai GP3 at 100 ISO.

The contrast is a bit lower than normal, but for motives with high contrast that's just fine.

PC-Sulfite: A simple developer giving XTOL-quality

Hi folks, I'm a new contributor to this blog. Erik saw my work with ascorbate developers that I reported on apug.org, and gave me the honor of contributing here. Here is a useful developer that I discovered, and there are a couple more that I'm working on.

PC-Sulfite gives XTOL-like image-quality with D-23 simplicity. Well, almost as simple as D-23. If your motto is "simple is beautiful", you'll like PC-Sulfite. Here's the 1-liter formula:

Sodium sulfite ................ 90 g
Phenidone ...................... 0.15 g
Ascorbic acid ................. 2.8 g

Target pH = 8.2 (same as XTOL).
Add 15% to XTOL's time as a starting-point.

I use a 1% solution of phenidone in propylene glycol (PG) because phenidone is slow to dissolve in water.
I've tested this formula with Tmax-400 (TMY) and Tri-X (TX) using distilled water at 20C, which covers both conventional grain and T-grain films. I suspect this will work fine on all films, but test first. I've also compared this with test-strips of TMY developed in XTOL, and carefully examining the neg's through 22x loupes, I could scarcely see any difference between them. Same grain and shadow-detail.

Some warnings:

• When mixing, dissolve the sulfite first, so it'll scavenge the oxygen that dissolved in the water.
• Use the developer shortly after mixing. PC-Sulfite contains no chelation/sequestration agents, so its shelf-life will probably be short, even if you use distilled water.
• The chemistry of PC-Sulfite is sufficiently different from XTOL that, for other films, times might vary significantly from the "add 15%" rule above. Test first.
• I haven't tried diluting it, but the pH of a sample of diluted PC-Sulfite matches that of diluted XTOL, so I'd expect it'll deliver similar results.

An interesting fact: You can be sloppy about measuring the ascorbic acid. For example, boosting the ascorbic acid will help the phenidone, increasing activity, but will also drop the pH, reducing activity. These effects roughly cancel out. My first test had 3.5g ascorbic acid, and the correct time was about the same as this 2.8g version. Both negatives looked about the same. I haven't tried reducing ascorbic below 2.8g, but I'd say that being .1 or .2g off in measurement will have negligible effect.

There's a long thread in apug.org (starting here: http://www.apug.org/forums/forum37/98430-improved-version-ds-10-ryuji-suzuki.html), and Photo Engineer (PE) encouraged me to remove borate from a formula I'm working on due to environmental restrictions. After doing so, and removing the propylene glycol carrier as well, this is all that was left. It's so simple that I didn't think it could work, but it works well. Here are some test-shots. This is a full-resolution crop developed in XTOL:


And here's a crop developed in PC-Sulfite:


It's hard to see any difference. However, viewing these images on another monitor with a higher gamma makes it clear that PC-Sulfite yields more shadow-detail than XTOL.

As a final test, I walked around my neighborhood taking boring pictures on Tri-X with an Olympus Trip-35. It was a relief to see beautiful frames when I pulled the reel out of the tank. Here's a full-resolution crop of one of my boring pictures:


And the entire 35mm frame:


I hope this simple developer works well for you also.

Liptonoles

We have been playing with tea lately.  Not TEA which is used as an oxygen-free container for developing agents (see our instalment on PC-Glycol, which is made to much the same philosophy).

No we are concerned with tea, or thea as some put it, the drinking variety, the stuff we brew from small sachets from Lipton and Twinings.  The idea is to substitute this instead of the nbasty coffe in Caffenol.
I have read that this could work, but the pictures I've seen previously has been like the early, weak US american recipes from Caffenol, low contrast, extremely thin negatives with all kinds of other errors on them too.

So my goal was from the outset to try this and come up with something better.  I did this very simple, I brewed a large poit of very strong tea, 1 liter at rougly doubkle strength, compared to what Twinnings tell me. 

They state on sachet per large cup of tea, I used 2 and scaled up to one litre solution.  Per liter this came out as 8 sachets of Twinings passion fruit, mango and orange, or the leaves from those fruits.
Since this tea was the base of my brew, I did choose the name based on this : PASSIONOL.

I made a brew this way :

Tea, passion fruits , 750 ml
Soda 50 gram
Ascorbic acid 15 gram
top up volume to 1000 ml with the tea brew.

When I added soda to the tea brew, the color changed from a turbid yellow-brown to a clear black-brown, and the smell remained a sweet nice tea, unlike the nasty smell from caffenol.

I let the mix stand for ca 15 minutes, then added the ascorbic acid (vitamine C powder), this was accompanied with strong bubbling & frothing, just like caffenol, it seemed there was a good chance we
had something good here, as far as a developer goes.

So far I have published some details on this, the mix and reported results on Flickr, the Caffenol group, which is dedicated to all kinds of homebrew developers.  However I never found time to publish pictures, it is my intention to do that here.
The Flickr post started other experimenters and we have recruited another compatriot to show us his results with ordinary tea, the Earl Gray brand, which is common all across the civilized world.  He calls his product Grayanol as I understand and got the same results as me, his workj will also be shown on these pages.

Along the way I did test the ph and made clip tests on every step, this is interesting and an eyeopener. I got questioned on Flickr if the tea component actually did anything, the clip ytests answered that:

Clip test of tea plus soda alone gave little activity, only slightly grey film clips and only after a looong time.

Clip test of ascorbic acid and soda alone is standard operating procedure, well known from Caffenol, and is similar, it is weak but with a deeper black......

Clip test of both with soda does show the same as compared to Caffenol, good activity, ca 4 minutes gives deep, pitch black clips, much like Caffenol CH. I therefore did choose to give it a start time like C-CH as a test.

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

Picture samples ; Liptonol Kodak Gold 100, triplet exposure test, developed at 16 minutes @ 20C.

Exposed box speed, + 1 stop, -1 stop developed 16 minutes @ 20C

Exposed at box speed no post processing.

Same as above contrast and saturation adjusted one step

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

Picture samples ; Liptonol Kodak Gold 100, triplet exposure test, developed at 13 minutes @ 20C.

Exposed box speed, + 1 stop, -1 stop developed 16 minutes @ 20C

Exposed at box speed no post processing.

Same as above contrast and saturation adjusted one step

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

Picture samples ; Liptonol Kodak Gold 100, triplet exposure test, developed at 12 minutes @ 20C.

Exposed box speed, + 1 stop, -1 stop developed 16 minutes @ 20C

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

Picture samples ; Liptonol Kodak Gold 100, triplet exposure test, developed at 20 minutes @ 20C.

Hopefully other workers will try Passionol, Greyanol and all other types of tea, following the procedure outlined here. I have already ascertained for myself that it works, and that it is *different* from ordinary Caffenol, different enough tio be interesting in its own right. Good Luck!

Happy New Year!

This little blog now celebrates its first full year.

I started out this a year ago in frustration, moderators over on other places - "high-priests" with a full blown court of supporters, made it difficult to present facts and interesting tidbits without a constant stream of negativism.....  So I went for this blog. Hopefully this has been of some help to someone.

Along the road I have been lucky enough to meet a couple of individuals that I share values with, Michael and Tore, who are both valuable co-authors and contributors on this blog.  We don't necessary agree on everything, but share the interest of presenting the facts, not fiction, and not something that is out of line or downright not true.....

When I started out, I was surprised after the first couple of moths when I noted that the audience had reached a staggering 1000 people!  So I started to take this more seriously and set myself a target, 12 000 readers by New Years eve 2012.
Now the numbers are in, we did just pass 15 256, so the goal has been reached and surpassed by a good margin.

I wish you all a Happy and Proseperous New Year, and hope you continue to visit these pages and find something of value.

If you have comments- praise or criticism, please don't hold back, each and every opinion is valuable, and will be treated seriously.

ErikP

Quick and dirty Reducer

Reducer (simple and probably not the most effective in this world...)


A simple reducer bath might come handy if one has troble with fogging, this happens sometimes with unfortunate combinations of film types and ascorbate-type developers.

The idea is to bleach away the image, and then re-develop the film in bright light, so that all of the silver is available for re-development, and in bright light, very controllable so one can stop the process after the image is back, but before the fogging is redeveloped......
The trouble with traditional recipes always was toxicity, chemicals was used that posed a definite threat if misused, and in ou4r search for a simple alternative, these two recipes cropped up.

I haven't tessted and compared these with the old industry standard, Farmer's reducer, so these simple recipes most likely ain't too effective, but, they should work and make do if needed.

I have no idea of how these will keep in solution, but they are both cheap and simple, and can be discarded after use, and one should also be able to just dump this in the drain since no deadly poisons are used.

Eder suggest :

Water 750 ml
Copper sulphate 50 g
Sodium chloride 50 g
Water to 1000 ml


Agfa suggest :

Water 750 ml
Copper sulphate 100 g
Sodium chloride 100 g
Sulpuric acid conc. 25ml
Water to 1000 ml



Negatives to be treated in subdued light, preferably a darkroom with darkroom lightning, until one has a white-color "image", then be watered for 2 .. 3 min (3 changes of water, agitated like the Ilford method).

Then the image must be RE-development in daylight, in a normal or a finegrain developer, until satisfaction, but before one get fog, and then a normal acid stop, fixation and a thorough washing, like normal development.

Make a careful note bleaching and reduction will save some of the picture qualities only, one will ALWAYS loose picture quaklity with this procedure!  Loss of detail sharpness and large grain are traditionally connected with this, but the use of a fine gran RE-developer sometimes negates the large grain, this usually comes with a cost of low contrast.

All taken together this technique should be carefully considered before one risks destroying valuable negatives!

The ingredients :

Concentrated sulphuric acid is impossible to get over here, after 09.11.01 and 22.07.11, since it is a effectice raw material for explosives production.


Instead we use battery acid (33%) multiply with 3 and simply fill with water to 1000ml ,
 
Copper sulphate should be available at Radio Shack, it was used in making amatuer printed circuits back in the 1970's AFAIR.
 
Sodium chloride is ordinary table salt! Can't be simpler than that!
 
And  finally a viable USE for table salt in photography!

A TCB developer with long life.

While working with the testing of several developers I came to the conclusion that TCB and PCB developers have good shelf-life, but when used and re-used as D76, they became less active rather quickly. This because the ascorbic acid is destroyed by arial oxidation during use.

To overcome this problem I added some sodium sulfite to the TCB developer.
The tests shows that this fortified TCB developer doesn't loose it's breath so quickly. In fact it closely follows other reuseable developers. For a 1000ml stock bottle, add 6% of the developing time for each film developed.

Use the same table as shown in the article about the Fenomenal developer.

Mixing instructions.

You will need Parodinal to make this. The mixing instructons are outlined here.

Making p-aminophenol from Tylenol/Paracetamol with ascorbic acid as anitoxydant doesn't work as good as doing it the proper way.

500 ml water.
8 g Soduim carbonate. (Soda)
10 g Ascorbic acid. pH at this moment is 9.6
80 g Sodium sulfite
10 ml Parodinal
20 g borax.
Water to 1000 ml. pH at this moment is 9.15

Starting time: 10 min @ 20C for Fomapan 100






This triplet is exposed +-0EV, -1EV and +1EV.


This is the image exposed according to the meter. Contrast increased a bit.
Sharpness is good. Grains are fairly small.

These images was extracted from the 4.th film through a 500ml batch of the developer.
Development time was 14 minutes @20C. This complies with the table for increasing time for each film. Since this is a 500ml batch, the starting time is multiplied with 1.42, giving me 14.2 minutes. The correct time is 14 minutes and 12 seconds, but the 12 seconds isn't going to make any visible difference at 14 minutes, so let us forget about them.

I am going to put this stock bottle on the shelf for now. Sometime i February or March 2012 I am going to develop a film or two in it to make sure it can survive some weeks on the shelf.

I am quite sure it still will be active by then.