C41 in caffenol and Liptonole

wickerman

wickerman

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I have a brick of OOD Kodak Gold 100 in the freezer and don't really like it as a colour film. It was bought off ebay very cheaply and said to have been stored frozen which I doubt.

So I thought I'd have a go at developing it with Caffenol. From a quick look on the internet some say caffenol gives poor results for C41 film others seem to have produced some very good pictures with it.

Only one way to find out, I wandered around the garden taken shots of this and that.

Here are some of the results.....

I couldn't get my cat Daisy to pose on the wall like she usually does so the next best thing....


Cat on the wall (1) by wickerman6, on Flickr



Cat on the wall (2) by wickerman6, on Flickr



Catkins by wickerman6, on Flickr


Garage Saws by wickerman6, on Flickr


Overall I'm quite pleased with the results. Some of the shots did need quite a bit of work in Lightroom, whilst others needed the merest tweak...odd that for shots on the same roll and shot in more or less the same light.
 
Lovely results David,

I've only tried caffenol a couple of times on colour films, but I'm sure my results were not as good as yours. Something magical about developing film in household chemicals so I will definitely return again as I too have some OOD colour film to play with.

Thanks for sharing.
 
Lyope said:
Arabica or Robusta?

:D
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Nah, the cheapest gut rot stuff that Tesco can supply. :)
Steve said:
Lovely results David,

I've only tried caffenol a couple of times on colour films, but I'm sure my results were not as good as yours. Something magical about developing film in household chemicals so I will definitely return again as I too have some OOD colour film to play with.

Thanks for sharing.
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Cheers Steve. It's nice to make use of film that I otherwise wouldn't know what to do with.
 
Nice results. I've got a ton of vista here and I may try this. What timings did you use I you don't mind me asking?
 
norters said:
Nice results. I've got a ton of vista here and I may try this. What timings did you use I you don't mind me asking?
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I read on flickr that a recommended time for Kodak Gold 100 was 16 mins so I tried this and it seems to have worked reasonably well. I used the caffenol c-m recipe with a pinch (0.15g) of KBr in a 300ml mix. It seems that despite it all being C-41 film there are different times recommended for different C-41 film makes and speeds.

I have also got a load of vista doing nothing so I might also give it a try. It would be good to see your results and compare.
 
David, a very good outcome in my view. Those shots look very nice.
 
Good stuff. Decent tones and contrast in those.

Thanks for sharing, definitely worth a go.
 
As a follow on from yesterday, I found a roll of Agfa Vista 200 that I had been meaning to take to Asda to get developed. I had actually forgotten what was on it.

Anyway, rather than use coffee I decided to try tea to develop it, Twinings Liquorice tea to be precise.

It worked...it's a bit grainy but here's an example of the result...

 
Here's a couple more developed in Twinings Liquorice tea aka "Liptonole"...




 
Recipe please.... and a smellometer rating? The pics have come out very well, although I was anticipatibg a tea-coloured effect (aka sepia?).
 
Is it best to brew the tea or coffee oneself of is it permissible to get one's valet or butler to perform that oh-so onerous task?

On a more serious note, yes, please for the recipes! Having switched to an electric butler to do the brewing (by the name of Tassimo!), we have a fair bit of coffee (instant, ground and powder ground) and a load of teabags going spare. Unfortunately, I offloaded my dev tank a few years ago but I reckon I could probably source a new one.
 
One can always get Roberts to do a pot of tea rather than an afternoon brandy.

These have come out much better than my experiments with C41 in Rodinal may give it a go one day.
 
ChrisR said:
Recipe please.... and a smellometer rating? The pics have come out very well, although I was anticipatibg a tea-coloured effect (aka sepia?).
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Nod said:
Is it best to brew the tea or coffee oneself of is it permissible to get one's valet or butler to perform that oh-so onerous task?

On a more serious note, yes, please for the recipes! Having switched to an electric butler to do the brewing (by the name of Tassimo!), we have a fair bit of coffee (instant, ground and powder ground) and a load of teabags going spare. Unfortunately, I offloaded my dev tank a few years ago but I reckon I could probably source a new one.
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I used the recipe from here , although I only had Liquorice tea so used that; I'm not sure that the brand makes that much difference.

The smell of the Liptonole is better than caffenol but that's not saying much:)
 
Thanks, David. Which brand of washing soda do you use? Not a range of products I'm that familiar with! Vitamin C is fairly standard but "Soda" covers a fairly wide range of things from Bicarb up to Natron!
 
Excellent. I have used Caffenol to process film once and I was impressed. It compared very favourably with the Ilfosol I was using at the time.

I would much rather use coffee to develop film than drink the vile stuff!


Steve.
 
Nod said:
Thanks, David. Which brand of washing soda do you use? Not a range of products I'm that familiar with! Vitamin C is fairly standard but "Soda" covers a fairly wide range of things from Bicarb up to Natron!
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The soda is actually sodium carbonate (NA2CO3). I had a huge bag of Bicarb that I bought from a Chinese supermarket and converted that to sodium carbonate by heating it. It then becomes "waterfree" or "anhydrous".

The recipes that you see will be for anhydrous washing soda. When I run out of my current stock I'll use the Dripak washing soda stuff that our local Tesco sells. This is decahydrate soda and you need to multiply the soda weight by x2.7 if using this.

HTH
 
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Sodium carbonate can be bought from Amazon for as little as 70p for 500g. I'm interested in giving caffenol a whirl and was looking at Amazon and ebay for the ingredients because I wasn't sure where else to go!
 
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