To develop a roll of film and make negatives for printing, it is necessary to strip the film's exposed silver halides. Usually, this is done with conventional developing solutions. Since the developer is the primary ingredient in the process, a lot of it is used. Unfortunately, the developer is one of the most problematic chemicals used in photography. It's awful for the environment, and it can be expensive. It smells pretty nasty, too. (Fixer, a chemical used later in the process to preserve the negatives, has similar issues, but it won't be covered in this article.) Developing solutions are even worse after they've been used. Most of the silver halides from the film are washed away in the developer (some are left over until the stop bath), leaving you with a chemical that you can't just toss in the yard.
To get rid of used developer, it has to be stored until it can be taken for hazardous waste disposal. Before I learned all this, I was used to tossing my bucket of chemicals into the soil in my backyard. It was pretty close to a storm drain, too. Not all that cool. It would be great to have a developing solution that could be thrown out the window, but even Caffenol won't get us that far (ugh, silver!). Using it as an alternative developer, however, will reduce the nastiness and eye-burning odor a bit. Even better, it's cheap! You don't often see greener options that are cheaper than their nasty counterparts.
Caffenol is a developer consisting of only washing soda (which is used commonly as a laundry detergent), coffee crystals (like Instant Folgers), and sometimes vitamin C (for making Caffenol-C). It replaces the commercial developing chemical in developing black and white film. It was introduced seventeen years ago by Dr. Scott Williams and his class at the Rochester Institute of Technology when he experimented with his class to find a household developer. After reading a bit about Caffenol, I followed the instructions on the Photojojo blog (link below), so the steps here are based off of their methods and tips from some helpful photographers at the printing lab.
Note: Every photograph in this article, with the exception of three stock images, is shot in black-and-white and developed with Caffenol-C.
Helpful links and sources:
http://people.rit.edu/andpph/text-coffee.html
http://content.photojojo.com/tutorials/coffee-caffenol-film-developing/
http://caffenol.blogspot.com/
To get rid of used developer, it has to be stored until it can be taken for hazardous waste disposal. Before I learned all this, I was used to tossing my bucket of chemicals into the soil in my backyard. It was pretty close to a storm drain, too. Not all that cool. It would be great to have a developing solution that could be thrown out the window, but even Caffenol won't get us that far (ugh, silver!). Using it as an alternative developer, however, will reduce the nastiness and eye-burning odor a bit. Even better, it's cheap! You don't often see greener options that are cheaper than their nasty counterparts.
Caffenol is a developer consisting of only washing soda (which is used commonly as a laundry detergent), coffee crystals (like Instant Folgers), and sometimes vitamin C (for making Caffenol-C). It replaces the commercial developing chemical in developing black and white film. It was introduced seventeen years ago by Dr. Scott Williams and his class at the Rochester Institute of Technology when he experimented with his class to find a household developer. After reading a bit about Caffenol, I followed the instructions on the Photojojo blog (link below), so the steps here are based off of their methods and tips from some helpful photographers at the printing lab.
Note: Every photograph in this article, with the exception of three stock images, is shot in black-and-white and developed with Caffenol-C.
Helpful links and sources:
http://people.rit.edu/andpph/text-coffee.html
http://content.photojojo.com/tutorials/coffee-caffenol-film-developing/
http://caffenol.blogspot.com/
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Signing UpStep 1: Collecting and Prepping Supplies
GATHERING
I managed to get all of my supplies from the local hardware store, photography lab, and under my sink. It's not too hard.
From the photo store:
Film, if you don't already have a roll that you want to develop
A daylight developing tank - nothing specific, just don't forget a matching spool!
Changing bag or a dark room
Fixer - I use Kodak Professional
Optional: Brown chemical storage jug (or two)
From the hardware store:
Washing Soda - I use Arm & Hammer (not baking soda)
A few measuring cylinders - 16 oz. each
Large glass cups, unless you already have some that you're willing to clean well
You might already have all of these things. They're pretty common, you know.
From under the sink:
Vitamin C powder - You might need to get this at a drugstore or online.
Instant coffee crystals - Well, it's above the sink, but hey.
An eency bit of dishwashing liquid soap
Bottle opener and scissors
A few gallons of water - Get it from the hose, nearby pond, doesn't need to be fancy.
A clothespin or binder clip
Once you're finished with the process, you'll be left with a strip of negatives that will need to be cut and sent to a photo lab for printing, unless you have a negative scanner or you're able to print them yourself.
PREPPING
Caffenol-C
Fill two glasses with 6 oz. of water each. Mix 5 teaspoons of instant coffee crystals and between 3/4 and 1 whole teaspoon of vitamin C (see step five for more detail) into the first glass. Mix 3-1/2 teaspoons of washing soda into the second glass. Don't leave too many lumps! When everything's mixed, stir the two solutions together in a single glass. Ta-da! It's Caffenol-C!
Fixer
Follow the instructions on the bag your fixing chemical came in to make a batch. I decided to mix my whole bag at once and keep it in a brown chemical jug under the counter. It should last for a while, and you can reuse fixer a few times.
Bath
Fill another clean glass with water and stir in a few drops of dishwashing liquid. It doesn't need to be specific, it'll just be used to wash the fixer and other leftovers off of your film. Don't get too many bubbles, though, since it can be a pain to pull your film out of a bucket of foam.
I managed to get all of my supplies from the local hardware store, photography lab, and under my sink. It's not too hard.
From the photo store:
Film, if you don't already have a roll that you want to develop
A daylight developing tank - nothing specific, just don't forget a matching spool!
Changing bag or a dark room
Fixer - I use Kodak Professional
Optional: Brown chemical storage jug (or two)
From the hardware store:
Washing Soda - I use Arm & Hammer (not baking soda)
A few measuring cylinders - 16 oz. each
Large glass cups, unless you already have some that you're willing to clean well
You might already have all of these things. They're pretty common, you know.
From under the sink:
Vitamin C powder - You might need to get this at a drugstore or online.
Instant coffee crystals - Well, it's above the sink, but hey.
An eency bit of dishwashing liquid soap
Bottle opener and scissors
A few gallons of water - Get it from the hose, nearby pond, doesn't need to be fancy.
A clothespin or binder clip
Once you're finished with the process, you'll be left with a strip of negatives that will need to be cut and sent to a photo lab for printing, unless you have a negative scanner or you're able to print them yourself.
PREPPING
Caffenol-C
Fill two glasses with 6 oz. of water each. Mix 5 teaspoons of instant coffee crystals and between 3/4 and 1 whole teaspoon of vitamin C (see step five for more detail) into the first glass. Mix 3-1/2 teaspoons of washing soda into the second glass. Don't leave too many lumps! When everything's mixed, stir the two solutions together in a single glass. Ta-da! It's Caffenol-C!
Fixer
Follow the instructions on the bag your fixing chemical came in to make a batch. I decided to mix my whole bag at once and keep it in a brown chemical jug under the counter. It should last for a while, and you can reuse fixer a few times.
Bath
Fill another clean glass with water and stir in a few drops of dishwashing liquid. It doesn't need to be specific, it'll just be used to wash the fixer and other leftovers off of your film. Don't get too many bubbles, though, since it can be a pain to pull your film out of a bucket of foam.
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yes, it works. I tested two weeks ago.
The developing chemical is in coffee directly. It is not any "magic substance" only in instant coffee. It is any chemical similar to hidroquinone (some type of phenol, don't know exactly). This is present in ground coffee as well.
In case of caffenol developer is there second developing chemical: ascorbic acid (vitamin C). Can make pictures less noisy and better in midtones. But hydroquinone can be enough (more contrast, more grain).
Just imagine - what is the instant coffee? Once used coffee :-) Boiled, dryed and again dissolved in water :-)
I tested to take about 10 portions of rests of coffee. Dryed on radiator. Next boiled for 2-3 minutes in 0.6 liter of water. Filtered throught old handkerchief (I got about 0.4 liter back). And cool down to room temperature (20 degrees approx). Added 2 or 3 soup spoons of washing soda during the cooling process.
OK. I take a piece of film. Here is one problem - I had those days free time only during late evening or during night, so this was negative Ilford P4 (a clone of HP5+) 400 ASA, but exposed as 1600 - this is twice push up process.
When my normal developing time with caffenol similar strong (4 portions of unused instant coffee and 10x250 mg vit. C in tabs) is 15 minutes, here I decided the basic time to 30 minutes (10 portions of once used coffee and without the second developing substance). Because of 2x push-up (which means time x1,6 and x1,6 again) the final time was near 90 minutes. But with normally exposed negative film should be 30 or 40 minutes enough.
I had one problem - bad wash of antireflex layer in fixer. I must use fixer again for longer time. My advice: fix it 20 minutes.
Result: It works. You can see whole process and final pictures here:
http://underground.egicz.cz/denik/denik.php?rok=2012&mesic=10#20121014
Remember: shooted at night, it's twice pushed up, without ascorbic acid - so it's with more noise and more contrast ... on the opposite side it is creative :-)
And yes - this is most eco-friendly and cheapest developer in the world :-)
Just a couple of things:
The developer does not pick up any silver or silver halides and it is perfectly safe to put Caffenol down the drain. Nobody should ever be dumping chemicals on the ground. That is the absolute worst thing you could do for the planet.
The fixer (thiosulphate) is essentially benign and non-toxic. It's this solution that dissolves away the silver halides that have not been developed into elemental silver. This also can and should go down your drain. Silver ions are not toxic to life and will soon react with other stuff to make insoluble silver salts.
Finally, read the package to determine how many times a batch of fixer can be used - don't just throw it away after one or two uses because it's good for much more than that.
Thanks
The smell can be a bit strange once the stuff is mixed up, but if you are used to working in a darkroom with B&W chemicals it's nothing to gripe about.
A friend said he had just tried it with Fuji Neopan and was ecstatic about the resuts.
A chemistry lecturer I know said that theoreticaly, you could get similar results by using Cocaine as a reducing agent (developer) ; Just a little too expensive for me I think.
As for the availability of washing soda (Sodium Carbonate NOT Bi-Carbonate) in the USA, Walmart has it by the hundredweight in the cleaning section.
I do remember reading a rumor about cheap instant coffee being much worse for developing than "better" instant coffee, but I haven't seen any evidence behind it. Seems like another interesting topic to look further into. Maybe more experimentation is down the road, though I really don't want to imagine all of the potential variables in distinguishing between coffee brands and roasts.
To wrap up:
It smells like death.
Did your friend follow this Instructable, or one of the many other articles on the net?
I don't think I'll be developing with cocaine any time soon.
Good to hear about Walmart. I found my small box at our local Ace hardware.
Thanks for your comment!
By the way I'm UK based - I was taking an A level in photography and chose the coffee thing as a project for the personal investigation element. The lecturer knew nothing about it so I was basicaly out on my own as far as experimentation was concerned. This is where I wasted a couple of hours in the college darkroom first of all thinking I had made the classic mistake of placing the paper the wrong way up on under the enlarger, or not giving enough exposure or having mixed up the caffenol wrong. Once I had cottoned on to it being the 'soup' things developed nicely - no pun intended.
Exposure needs to stay the same as if you were using a normal developer, it's the development that may take a little longer.
Be patient and don't expect the image to start appearing quickly.
Development I would liken to using old out of date Bromide paper, it is slow and steady.
I think this instructable is very creative.
For a stop ath I would use household vinegar- standard acetic acid.
How would I deal with the silver in the spent developer and fixer?
I think I might put a pad of steel wool in the spent chemicals for a day or so. Iron is less toxic than silver.
In the color developing busness we put out excess spent chemicals trickeling through two 5 gallon buckets of steel wool before it went into the sewers to get the silver out.
(Once a month or so we would shut down the cell, remove the stainless steel drum, and tap it with a mallet to break off the quarter inch thick layers of PURE SILVER that covered it.)
Once the chemicals passed through the electrolosis cell, a small portion was discarded into the sewer after passing through two 5 gallon buckets (in series) of steel wool.
The remaining chemicals were aireated and strengthened with a regenerating solution before being reused.
Hypo could be desilvered before being discarded by putting it in a closed jar with a pad of steel wool for 24-48 hours or by taking it out doors and adding liver of sulphur (sodium sulphide) to it to precipitate silver sulphide (BEWARE: Poisonous Hydrogen Sulphide gas is produced).
For home photographers, I wouldn't even both with stop bath, and you can buy sodium thiosulfate from pool supply stores sometimes; it's sold for reducing chlorine (unfortunately, sodium sulfite is also sold for this purpose, so unless you're sure which you're getting, I wouldn't get it there). You can also buy sodium thiosulfate at a number of online chemical dealers; it's not considered hazardous for shipping, so five pounds with shipping won't cost a bunch. I mix one ounce (by weight) of the thiosulfate in a quart of water (or 30 grams per liter, if you're metric), use it once, and put it down the drain. The silver will plate out in the first metal pipe it encounters, and the thiosulfate will oxidize to sulfite or sulfate, in harmless quantity (assuming you're not developer dozens of rolls of film per week).
Oh, I might also mention -- though I didn't invent coffee developers, I did originate the name Caffenol and Caffenol-C is originally my own innovation.
http://silent1.home.netcom.com/Photography/Dilutions%20and%20Times.html
I'm still wondering about where the silver hallides end up, though. I was under the impression that the developer, whether it was conventional or not, stripped hallides from the film. The stop bath and fixer just picked up leftovers with the other functions they served. Right?
Also, ImageMaker, I'm not quite sure what you meant in your second paragraph. What do you use the thiosulfate for?
Sodium thiosulfate is the most basic fixer ingredient -- a simple solution of just sodium thiosulfate in water makes "plain hypo" fixer, which will fix "conventional grain" films (older types like Plus-X, Tri-X, Ilford Pan F, and so forth -- ones with cubic halide grains) in 8-10 minutes at common developing temperatures. Plain hypo can be used one-shot at 30 g/l strength, or it can be mixed at 120 g/l and sodium sulfite added at 25 g/l, and reused just like commercial fixer sold as a bag of dry ingredients (typically ten or more films per liter; the actual rule is to fix for twice the time required to visually clear the film, and discard fixer when the clearing time has doubled from the original value). Many modern commercial fixers are "rapid" types, based on ammonium thiosulfate; they work about twice as fast, and are the only kind usually recommended for use with "delta" or "T" grain type films such as Ilford Delta 100 and Kodak's T-Max family. Ammonium thiocyanate also works as a rapid fixer, but is much less available and more expensive, so it's seldom used.
In fact, it is possible to fix T grain or delta grain films with plain hypo, if you use a two-bath fixing process -- put the film into the first bath, and when it's nearly cleared (light exposure doesn't matter if it's not going back into a developer before fixing is completed -- you can turn on the lights or open the tank once the film has been in fixer for one minute), move it to the second bath and leave it for the same amount of time the first bath took; for this method, you should mix 120 grams of sodium thiosulfate per liter and add 25 g/l of sodium sulfite as a preservative, reuse the fixer, and after fixing ten films (135-36, 120, or 8x10 equivalent in sheet film or other sizes) discard the first bath, replace it with the second, and mix fresh fixer for the second bath.
As for stop bath, the primary purpose it serves is to give a precise "stop" time to the development -- and the development rate is generally so slow at the end of standard developer times that this matters very little, if at all, compared to the slow exhaustion of the tiny bit of developer that carries over in the emulsion and continues to work until fixer removes all the halide it could develop. There are good arguments to be made that the shift from alkaline developer to acidic stop bath and fixer (commercial fixers are almost as acidic as stop bath) is bad for the emulsion compared to using a mildly alkaline fixer (plain hypo, or hypo plus sodium sulfite, is less alkaline than most developers, but definitely not acidic). A secondary purpose of stop bath is to limit developer contamination of the fixer, but if, as I do, you mix your fixer weak and use it only once, this doesn't matter (and it matters very little anyway, for the reasons given above); if you're reusing your fixer and are concerned about it, a plain water rinse (fill the tank, agitate for ten seconds, drain, repeat twice more) will prevent carried over developer from being a problem before your fixer is exhausted.
I've been reusing my fixer and rinsing the tank after developing. I'm not using a chemical stop bath. The fixer is the only chemical taking away silver, right? Is there any benefit to using plain hypo fixer over conventional fixer? I think one of my primary goals is reducing the nastiness enough to dump everything without remorse.
The main benefit of plain hypo over commercial fixer is cost. I figure my one-shot hypo, at 30 g/l with no sulfite (preservative isn't needed because I'll discard the solution within an hour of mixing it) costs around a nickel a roll; if I make reusable fixer with sulfite, the cost goes down a little further. Commercial rapid fixer runs 4-5 times that figure. The other advantage of one-shot fixer at the lower strength is just what you're after -- the amount of silver and thiosulfate per liter of water is very small (you'll get around 1 gram of silver per roll from fixing normally exposed film), neither one has a long life in a sewer system, and residual silver is very efficiently caught in the coagulation and settling stages of sewage treatment (though too much of it can negatively affect the bacteria that do that job, it'd take kilograms in a settling pond to cause trouble).
Caffenol C is hardly any worse -- everything in it would normally go down drains in one form or another anyway: laundry soda, coffee, and vitamin C (the latter of which quickly oxidizes to equally harmless simpler organics in a sewer environment) are harmless enough you could actually drink small quantities of the stuff without harm (though I wouldn't suggest it; the washing soda probably tastes pretty nasty).
It is important to ensure dogs don't ingest fixer or its immediate residue -- thiosulfate is pretty toxic to them -- but that's not usually a problem unless you spill it in their food.
I'd be interested to see how this process works on prints. Might have to break out some of the old gear to give it a try.
Please tell me you entered this in the analog photo contest, too.
Yes, I entered this in the Analog Photo Challenge and the Green Tech Contest.