Caffenol-C tragedy

I´m with Erik. Just because Caffenol is home brew doesn´t mean that one all of a sudden goes all sloppy over the usual details. I wouldn´t be if using a regular developer, I won´t start with Caffenol. I do however experiment by varying the amount and type of ingredient, but only one of either at a time to have an idea as to what caused the change in result, good or bad. That is another matter.

I agree that different Caffenol recipes work. But some do in fact work better than others for certain types of film. Indeed Caffenol-C-L balances so close to the lower alkalic limit needed for the developer to work at all it would go very wrong if you measured a gram or two one way or the other of either soda or vitamin C. I use Caffenol-C-H and C-M which are more robust to errors, but I still want the results to be predictable, and therefore I meter everything out precisely. If other people prefer not to, well fine.

Guitstick, no you're wrong. We cannot both be right at the same time, NOT IN THIS CONTEXT.

You started this in a bewildered cry for help, apparently you had no idea why your caffenol didn't work.

You got a very prescise explanation to the matter, no talk about other things that MIGHT be wrong, but a prescise, to the point explanation.

You used the wrong vitamin c, but more importantly FAR too little of it, if you increased your dose 20, maybe forty times (I'm not intimately familiar witht that brand, but walked down that road with tabnlets with modest success on my first try), you would have had results.

I hereby will like to encourage you to try that out, exactly as I say, don't change anything except the ascorbine acid, and be damn ACCURATE, and increase your vitamin C juice 40 times from your first test, and report back!

You see, being sloppy is for ARTISTS, like for instance that great spanish painter Pablo Picasso, at the end of his life he was sloppy as hell, suceesful like noone else, and stinking rich and successful with the ladies to boot. At that time noone saw & remembered his early years, when he started out like everyone else and learned his craft. It was only after mastering the basics better than everyone, that he was able to let himself free and reach that level....

You (and I) are not there yet. We're learning, and when something goes wrong, its damn hard work to pinpoint what was the cause, if you changed everything, or did not know what you did in DETAIL, you would never learn anything.

The world is full of people that never mastered anything. The artists are few and far between. The Master artists are in a class of their own. I've never met any of those.

One example : Ezzie talked about different films needing different treatment. That is obvious, and very true when we talk about other developers. So far Caffenol has been very forgiving, and more or less enabled me to treat everything as if they where the same film. Ezzie is more particular than me, he is chasing that perfectly exposed, perfectly developed film, while I've entertained myself with rescueing long forgotten films thats been lying for close to 40 years or even more. But I'm also chasing the perfect developer - thats why I like to keep record and track about all the details, so I can IMPROVE.

I had one astonishing result : the first Kodak Advantix film I developed was a film found in a batch of unexposed films (€bay seller fooled me!). I put it in caffenol since the film was'nt important to me, and I wanted to test my modified tank for APS film : Developed in CC-M a little longer than usual, as I recall (have the data elsewhere), since this was from bottles previously mixed at 3X concentration and measured out 1/3 from each storage bottle. The storage bottles had been standing for some days and I suspected something had detoriated, so I gave it a few minutes longer than my standard 15 minutes @ 20 Centigrade. The negatives came out as color negatives! I have no explanation, I'm not complaining, but I'm desperate to repeat that! I have a hunch that will never happen.....since the next APS film came out exactly like all the Kodak Gold 200 I've developed, with a bog standard yellow mask and B&W.

So there you have it, there's no end of experiments and fun, even if you try to safeguard everything and be as accurate as you can!



Erik

Eric, I agree with you but at the same time I agree with John, both view points are valid. At this point in the game for me I must be particular as to how I go about this by following all of the advice that I can gather. I believe that after reevaluating the ingredients that I used I now have the correct ones. There is a learning curve that I must follow and after that I can, if I feel, play fast and loose with how I mix. As to John being correct, there is just no denying the results he gets from his mixtures, they are great. As I stated earlier, a master chef can just "throw" stuff in a pot and come out with a four star meal but the novice must measure. I am a novice and I take all the advice I receive and filter it until I think I understand. If, as in this case, I fail I reevaluate and ask more questions. Eventually I will get it and it will be because of ALL the advice I get. Everyone has helped me and I hope others as well.

I don't understand why this thread has gotten combative. All I see people saying is that (1) it matters that you use the right ingredients (e.g., washing soda, not baking soda!), (2) precision of measurement (e.g., measuring by weight vs. volume) doesn't seem to make a big difference with this developer, and (3) those two points are not in conflict. What's to disagree about?

-NT

Agree!

Volume : its a VERY PRESCISE WAY to measure powders of any kind. The only trouble is that there are slightly different standards for what a teaspoon is across the globe.

A gram is a gram, it's the yankees damn loss of luck that they never did understand the metric system!

Bushels, grains, ounces, pinches and the length of a dead kings thumb, all that was dumbed by people of culture and education a couple of centuries ago!


PS AFAIC the sound volume increased when someone started to confuse the issue with stand development, we're not there yet, far from it!

Picture quality, just wait, Ezzie published pictures from his latest film today, we're running a test here locally, with storage bottles, and he used the last deci-liters to develop two films, one of which was ready late tonite. If anyone can demonstrate impressive results, look no further, working slow and accurate, we have now honed in on Caffenol, its a mature developer, predictable and very, very stable & valuable. The results are sharp and contrasty, with an eerie feeling that your'e watching a knife-sharp engraving!

-- -- ---

Eric, så jeg på Ezzie's galleri og jeg må si at jeg er enig med deg om hans resultater, de er fantastiske.

Joel

guitstik said:

Eric, I agree with you but at the same time I agree with John, both view points are valid. At this point in the game for me I must be particular as to how I go about this by following all of the advice that I can gather. I believe that after reevaluating the ingredients that I used I now have the correct ones. There is a learning curve that I must follow and after that I can, if I feel, play fast and loose with how I mix. As to John being correct, there is just no denying the results he gets from his mixtures, they are great. As I stated earlier, a master chef can just "throw" stuff in a pot and come out with a four star meal but the novice must measure. I am a novice and I take all the advice I receive and filter it until I think I understand. If, as in this case, I fail I reevaluate and ask more questions. Eventually I will get it and it will be because of ALL the advice I get. Everyone has helped me and I hope others as well.

Click to expand...

Agree, we're on the same page. First you learn how to ride a bicycle, then you practice a lot, get a good trainer etc etc. Finally after a lot of hard work, you go for the world record.

As to the other thing I will not be dragged into a net-fight, had no desire for it, just felt that this thread was not appropiate for discussing all the other, confusing stuff.
Besides I never got any good results with stand development in spiral tanks, they are not designed for that IMHO. YMMV.

EriK

you have used this developer for 6 months and you are an expert ? :munch:
i guess i am an expert in a lot of things, and i didn't know it

guitstik said:

Eric, så jeg på Ezzie's galleri og jeg må si at jeg er enig med deg om hans resultater, de er fantastiske.

Joel

Click to expand...

Sure thing Ezzie started this after me, even, and is already a Kaffe-Meister!
How is it possible to master this in such a short time? Well experience counts for a lot, this is the same thing as many other developers, as soon as one peel away the layers of mysticism about Caffenol, threat it just like any other developer, studies the thing in-depth, and threath the thing with respect, accuracy and repeatability, it IS like any other developer.

We have studied long storage of this developer, tried storage bottles for the separate ingredients, that works beautifully, and surprisingly its not the ascorbic acid bottle that takes least to storage, it seems (this is still an ongoing project), but the coffee bottle. We have studied ready-mixed developer, that is supposed to be used within half an hour according to the early sources, it can be stored and then used several days after mixing (still on-going project). And we have studied re-use of the developer, i.e. mix up a batch, develop a film and reusing the same batch a few days later, surprisingly, and contrary to rumor, this also worked, at least sort of.

I guess if I had a set-up I would be studying stand development. Early reports said that this was impossible, but I read that some make it work. My question would be how they manage to make the ready-mixed developer survive in a deep, standing tank, and what replenisher, if any, they use. Its an interesting subject. And no doubt some are able to make it work. Flying thought : 3 or 4 four inch plastic drain pipes, a little over 5 feet deep, would be a nice and non-expensive setup for stand developing tanks!

As you can see theres a whole array of subjects to be covered and mastered, and no matter what path you decide to follow, once you have mastered the basics, there's plenty room for invention!

*YAWN*

guitstik said:

Eric, så jeg på Ezzie's galleri og jeg må si at jeg er enig med deg om hans resultater, de er fantastiske.

Joel

Click to expand...

Joel du er heldig som er multi-lingual, på den måten blir du raskt dobbelt så klok!

Lykke til med kaffen og ikke bruk alt som fremkaller, husk å drikk en kopp eller to også!

Turning tragedy to success!

Cross-processing is fascinating, and sometimes rewarding.

I had bad conscience for years over films that was forgotten and left to be developed "later" as new and more pressing things came up.

One was an on-going documentation of the local football team. As the season started, quite a few films from practice was left, and some old color films that either was outdated film when I got them or given me to be developed "to see if there was anything on them".

Caffenol CC-M gave such optimistic results that I decided to soothe my conscience and finally try to develop some of the old.

And it worked!

Very old FP3, HP3 and Kodak PlusX, and Tri X came out just fine, I tried citric acid as a restrainer against fogging, that worked, but was solved by potassium bromide.

But the mosty interesting thing was color.

I have now sucessfully developed Kodacolor X, together with my standard test medium; outdated Kodak Gold 200.

Color film gives a special quality when developed to B&W, a little less lpm than old TriX, less resolution and good solid grain, like TriX more or less.

The amazing thing is that I got images from more than 35 year old exposed film!
And I did it with the standard development, or in case of the oldest color film, a little longer, up from 15 minutes to 18 - 20 minutes.

The most fascinating was to try to develop an old roll of Kodachrome 64 that came into my posession in a camera bought on €bay.

This I developed just as normal, with fresh chemicals, and apparently just as normal. But when I was about to hang the film to dry, I was very disappointed, it was totally black!

I had forgotten all about the special backing on Kodachrome, black as sin! Once I spotted that I put the film back in the last washing water, and proceeded to remove the black coating between my fingers, very carefully!

And lo and behold, images appeared! To the naked eye it looks like normally developed B&W.

Now there's a good tip, since a month from now all the Kodachrome in the world will be worthless, orpohaned, when noone develops the stuff anymore. As soon as "smart" €bay sellers start dumping the stuff on unsuspecting buyers, snap it up for a song, use it as quality B&W film and develop in Caffenol!

Lets just say we have different approaches to Caffenol, and agree on that. No need to get one´s knickers in a twist.

Personally I like to be accurate as my equipment allows me, in order not to get nasty surprises, but that may well be a sign of inexperience, I´ve only been at this for a couple of months. Experimenting and the inevitable failures that will arise from these do give you valuable experience, and I´ve done a few. Enough to know that the high pH versions are quite tolerant to variations in both measuring, temperature and timing inaccuracies. But to be honest, I´m more interested in the results than the tests themselves. I would say that I´m quite good at Caffenol-C-H and TMX and TMY, and that´s about it. I would love to try Acros next.

And thank you for the positive feedback my pictures have given rise to.

eirik

as i have said all along, i don't really care how one
mixes or uses their chemistry.


"enjoy your coffee"

Erik Prestmo said:

Agree!

A gram is a gram, it's the yankees damn loss of luck that they never did understand the metric system!

Bushels, grains, ounces, pinches and the length of a dead kings thumb, all that was dumbed by people of culture and education a couple of centuries ago.

Click to expand...

It's not just us Americans -- my favorite non-metric unit is the french unit of length the pipe (pronounced peePAY). This was the distance that a man could walk while smoking one pipefull of tobacco.

he he we had similar things over here too - first it was the unique measure system from viking ages, then we got "civilized", and inherited the Dane system, with an entirely unique inch length, among others - the Norse men was big, hence their thumbs was longer and their inces too!

Utterly stupid - but so is the meter, it was originally supposed to be 1/xxxxxxx part of the distance from pole to pole, before the first satelites, not many knew that the earth is pear shaped....

However the metric system is far superior for anyone that has to calculate concentrations and lots of other scientific stuff. The trouble arises as soon as we start mixing units.

I have no problem with anyone using teaspoons to measure out chemicals, volumetric measures are incredibly accurate, if one knows how to do it.
But we must use the same size of teaspoon from place to place, in order to have a meaningful interchange of ideas. Variation grows naturally ouit of sound based knowledge.

And comparing german recipes to american teaspoon recipes, it springs in the face, US "gurus" advocate far too little of the chemicals for their developer to be active&productive, this coupled with simple misunderstandings, confusioons about the name of the chemicals etc etc, lands people in dire straits from time to time.

Erik

Erik Prestmo said:

Volume : its a VERY PRESCISE WAY to measure powders of any kind.

Click to expand...

Not necessarily. 10 ml of Kosher salt weigh quite a bit less than 10 ml of table salt. The finer grains of the table salt allow it to be compacted more than the coarser grains of the Kosher salt. I learned this, on of all things, a cooking program. They said to use twice the amount of Kosher salt as table salt.

So when measuring powders by volume you must consider the physical form of the substance you are measuring.

Exactly, thats another reason for being very METICOLOUS, especially when one tries to have a civil discussion about matters like this over the Net.

Variables like that can be very confusing, I have ascorbic acid (E 300) fine grained powder from the healt food store and E 300 from the preservatives aisle at the Mall, and I have Ascorbic Acid from the pharmacy (medicine). The two first yealds an active developer that gives good results every time. The last has given me no end of trouble. And I weigh all tree, still the sugar-like crystals are less active that the fine ground (E 300) powder.

Erik Prestmo said:

However the metric system is far superior for anyone that has to calculate concentrations and lots of other scientific stuff. The trouble arises as soon as we start mixing units.

Click to expand...

I agree completely. My only complaint with the metric system is that the units are not very suited to the problems of everyday life. I would hate to have to build a house using a meter stick. Millimeters and meters do not fit very well with the task. Unless they changed the definitions by which I mean that such units as centimeters and deciliters are not "official" metric units which must always differ by a factor of 1000. So millimeters are correct but centimeters are not. Same for milliliters and deciliters.

There was a contributer to the British Journal, a man by the name of Peckham. He freely mixed grams and grains in the same formula. They published some of his Amidol formulas without converting them to the same system.

good luck joel

Funny you should mention houses. On my wife's side they are carpenters, youngest son is going to be one (handy to have in the family!).

Housebuilding revolves around 60cm modules (two feet withing the centimeter) Walls are divided in sections of 60cm, insulation, wiondows, everything. These guys makes all kinds of calculations in their head, and makes funny faces if some measure don't "go up" with 60cm.

Practical workers always find a solution!

This thing with measures : volumetric vs weight was brought up by Reinhold, the guy that runs the Caffenol blog. It was seen as a way to take the chaos out of the Caffenol lore IMHO....

And I guess it was felt necessary because many of us felt that the ingredients wasn't *right* with US published formulas. If you follow the tsp-measures and then weigh up and do the math, you will find that concentrations are precariously low in the US formulas.

Reinhold has shown that too little soda leaves the pH precariously low. Things seem to indicate that a pH balancing around 9 is also balancing very close to a zero activity point. If one does a little error to one side there, there will be a blank film after fix bath. On the other side of one does a little error the other way, there will indeed be negatives - if development times are long enough (typical stand development situation).

If two people are communication over this from a distance, both of them will be *right*, both of them will have proof in the pudding that Caffenol both works and doesn't work - from the same basic formula!

Therefore more stuff, higher concentrations and higher Ph, around pH10 - 10.5 is a better starting point for anyone. One will have results, dev. times are shorter, contrast is better and ISO is higher. One does pay with a little more grain it seem.

Once mastered, one can start experimenting, and that usually means changing one component at a time.

Erik

Speaking of houses... I used to do carpentry, ALL of it, and I was very good at it but got to old and feeble. I have offered to build my wife a house starting from design, blueprints to the last shingle but my wife says that she would end up eliminating me and disposing of my body in a very nasty way. Her reason for this is that I am a perfectionist and every aspect would have to be plumb and square to the Nth degree and that would drive her up the wall because it would take forever to get anything done from all of the measuring.

joel

i am not planning to connect to this thread again
unless more disinformation or remarks are made about me


to clear up any mix-conceptions people may have of
me, the archives of apug run deep, feel free to to google my name
and caffenol c or caf 130 or caffenol 130 as your key words.
you will have no trouble realizing i have never told anyone to use
the wrong ingredients, and i have been fully transparent about
what i use and my results. i have used this developer for nearly
5 years and i rely on my own experiments, not work that someone
else might have posted on a blog. i am not a 6 month expert,
and even though i have probably mixed and used 100 gallons of caffenol,
used it in a variety of development regimens even a replenishment system
i am by not an expert or a guru and i have never claimed to be one.


while i have removed nearly all my work from the gallery,
if anyone needs actual proof that non-exact measurements
can yield perfectly usable results feel free to contact me i would
be happy to post something in my gallery. i process film all the time and have
no trouble providing images.



i won't be posting much joel, i have negatives to process and prints to make
and other stuff to do. i hope you found your answers in this broken record of a thread.

just to recap joel

robusta coffee ( instant )
powdered vit c
and washing soda

measure as you like, the world won't end if you don't use a scale and don't forget to have fun

jnanian said:

i won't be posting much, i have negatives to process and prints to make
and other stuff to do...

...don't forget to have fun

Click to expand...

Sorry to chop up your post, John, but these are the two best pieces of advice I've seen in quite awhile.

My encouragement to you, John... Keep shooting, keep processing (however the hell you want) and keep printing. And don't forget to have fun.

Cheers,