Developing in coffee

[Neil Barnes]

Well, after ploughing through a lot of sheets of CHS-50 I finally found a recipe that works. There's a lot of base fog, but a reasonably clean image that scans quite well if I use a sixteen bit scan.

This is St Alban's Cathedral this morning.

Neil

[Neil Barnes]

And a detail at 1200dpi of the crest above the organ from the middle picture above.

[Robert J Fallis]

Neil,
there good... what formula did you use?. I've got a out of date 35mm colour film in the canon which when used up will be developed in coffee

bob

[Neil Barnes]

A variant of Reinhold's CCM - lower alkali, and iodide as a restrainer, and lower overall concentration. You might be better advised on the flickr discussion group as to the right mix for C41 - it turns out that Adox sheet is not particularly friendly in this developer. However:

I'm using tincture of iodine (BP - 2.5% w/v iodine, 2.5% w/v potassium iodide) as a restrainer, developing in a tank (combiplan which leaks if I turn it upside down, so it gets sloshed around instead of inversion) with agitation for ten seconds every thirty seconds.

Here's the recipe. Note that my sodium carbonate is the decahydrate form...

54g Sodium carbonate decahydrate - DP Washing Soda from Waitrose(or 20g anhydrous)
8g vitamin C (Holland and Barrett)
20g instant coffee (Waitrose Essential)
0.5 ml iodine tincture (as above - this equates to 12.5mg of both iodine and potassium iodide in the final solution)

Added in order to approx 600ml water at 25C - the soda cools as it dissolves - and then topped up to one litre.

Two minute prewash, eighteen minutes develop with agitation, wash, and fix.

My overall feeling about the coffee is that it's not really suited to the Adox film though, once I've done it, I slightly prefer the look to R09. It has to be said though that the R09 is much cleaner and easier to work.

Neil