Direct Positive sepia-toned slide with Shallot-based developer

DarkroomExperimente · Mar 26, 2012

earlier tonight I developed a roll of Tri-X in one of my homemade developers

the basic formula for all my experiments is: (stuff to test) + (sodium carbonate)

so this time it was a developer made from chopped up shallots ( similar to onion, supposed to have a lot of Quercetin ) that soaked in a water/alcohol mix for a week

the developer was 750 ml of the shallot "extract" + 4 tbsp of sodium carbonate ( not all dissolved )

a short strip of Tri-X was developed for 3 hours....when I first looked at the film i thought I have thin negatives with a nice sepia tint....

when I looked again i realized these were POSITIVE images!!!

onions and garlic have allyl propyl disulphide in them ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allyl_propyl_disulfide ) ....I wonder is this behaving anything like sodium sulfide which I understand can act as a fogging developer?....could this or something else work on the unexposed silver and leave the latent image alone????

red onion did NOTHING to film when I tried it...so I was expecting the shallot developer to be weak or another total failure

it seems there was no normal development of the images....on the tail of film that was sticking out of the cassette there's the usual dark developed area....but everything else is a lighter brown tone...

what's going on??

I'll post scans tomorrow when the film is dry

keithwms · Mar 27, 2012

Cool! show!

DarkroomExperimente · Mar 27, 2012

here's one of the two images...if I had known this was going to happen I would have developed the whole roll...but i only processed a short strip of film

ME Super · Mar 27, 2012

Odd that I don't see any edge markings... but still that's pretty cool! I hope you measured carefully and wrote down your recipe.

DarkroomExperimente · Mar 27, 2012

yes I wrote down the recipe....it's up in my first comment

re: edge markings....the edges and areas between frames are actually pretty dark...dunno why edges seem so light in the scanned image...on the actual film the edges are much darker

keithwms · Mar 27, 2012

DarkroomExperimente said:
dunno why edges seem so light in the scanned image...on the actual film the edges are much darker

I suppose that's because of the auto-leveling software. It sees the sprocket holes and includes that white space in the exposure calculation. If you crop out the sprocket holes in your scan software, you may see a better result.

DarkroomExperimente · Mar 27, 2012

thanks...I usually crop out the sprocket holes

just got back from the store with a huge supply of shallot & garlic to try this again

MattKing · Mar 27, 2012

DarkroomExperimente said:
thanks...I usually crop out the sprocket holes

just got back from the store with a huge supply of shallot & garlic to try this again

People at the store will be wondering if you have been spending too much time reading about vampires

nworth · Mar 27, 2012

Onions and similar vegetable contain disulfides and other thio compounds, like sepia toners.

keithwms · Mar 27, 2012

I wonder if the developing ability of the shallots will be as variable as their taste. There are some very mild shallots and some very sharp ones... I certainly hope your result is reproducible, it's intriguing! Offhand the CI of the slide doesn't look very favorable though... I hope I'm wrong.

jjphoto · Mar 27, 2012

Try it with paper. Maybe you can shoot positives in a large format camera (or pinhole camera, ie shoebox), using normal photo paper.

JJ

DarkroomExperimente · Mar 27, 2012

got two containers full of new shallots...one soaking in the original water/alcohol...one just in water

i was going to do another run tonight...but ended up doing something else...so tomorrow hopefully I'll find out if this is easy to reproduce or if it's just some weird thing that only happens when the planets are aligned...

DarkroomExperimente · Mar 28, 2012

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keithwms said:
I wonder if the developing ability of the shallots will be as variable as their taste. There are some very mild shallots and some very sharp ones... I certainly hope your result is reproducible, it's intriguing! Offhand the CI of the slide doesn't look very favorable though... I hope I'm wrong.

Tried it again tonight.......no image, but I get the same nice sepia-ish tone all over the film

after the film dries I'll give it a closer examination...but for now I don't see any image at all

so now I'm wondering...how many times will I have to try this to get this effect to appear again?

since I was expecting the shallots to develop the film because of quercetin...i'm wondering if adding quercetin might do something interesting?

who knows...now I have more of a mystery than I did before.....

now the shallots only soaked in the water/alcohol for about 24 hours...not the full week like before...so that may be an issue

DarkroomExperimente · Mar 28, 2012

if variability of shallots is an issue...might have to test 1 shallot at a time...otherwise it might take a billion years to randomly get 6 identical shallots

there is gonna be a lot of smelly developer in my future

removed account4 · Mar 28, 2012

about the 1 day vs 5 days ...
how about have a batch of your developer and take some out every day and test it upto 5 days ..
maybe it is the how long you steep the shallots too ...

DarkroomExperimente · Mar 28, 2012

yup...lotta things to test

found a good thread here on direct reversal: (there was a url link here which no longer exists)

keithwms · Mar 28, 2012

Wikipedia suggests that tea shodul have much higher quercetin levels...

Foods rich in quercetin include black and green tea (Camellia sinensis; 20002500 mg/kg), capers (1800 mg/kg), lovage (1700 mg/kg), apples (440 mg/kg), onion, especially red onion (191 mg/kg) (higher concentrations of quercetin occur in the outermost rings), red grapes, citrus fruit, tomato, broccoli and other leafy green vegetables, and a number of berries, including raspberry, bog whortleberry (158 mg/kg, fresh weight), lingonberry (cultivated 74 mg/kg, wild 146 mg/kg), cranberry (cultivated 83 mg/kg, wild 121 mg/kg), chokeberry (89 mg/kg), sweet rowan (85 mg/kg), rowanberry (63 mg/kg), sea buckthorn berry (62 mg/kg), crowberry (cultivated 53 mg/kg, wild 56 mg/kg), and the fruit of the prickly pear cactus. A recent study found that organically grown tomatoes had 79% more quercetin than "conventionally grown".

DarkroomExperimente said:
if variability of shallots is an issue...might have to test 1 shallot at a time...otherwise it might take a billion years to randomly get 6 identical shallots

I think my approach would be the opposite- get a lot of different kinds, throw in some red onions to, make a nice soup. Something in the soup will do the job.

I guess there is a fair amount of selenium in there too. I tend to think of nuts and garlic and onions and such containing appreciable selenium. Not sure if that is a good thing or not.

DarkroomExperimente · Mar 28, 2012

thanks...I am also going to test garlic

going to test the shallot with added quercetin...since I have quercetin

DarkroomExperimente · Mar 30, 2012

later today I'm going to try and simulate what jnanian suggested in the other thread...that underdevelopment & fog generated the positive image

going to use quercetin ( which I was hoping what would actually be the developing agent in onions/shallots ) and sodium sulfide from a print toner

gonna do it in 50/50 water/alcohol since the original experiment was a water/alcohol mix....that may have nothing to do with it...BUT if the carbonate causes the water and alcohol to separate ( like it did in the red onion test ) then perhaps it could have some effect since some things would be more soluble in alcohol than water

also...I think in the first test I didn't do much agitation...dunno if that changes anything or not

any suggestions??

DarkroomExperimente · Mar 30, 2012

just tested 1.5 g quercetin with 0.5 g sodium sulfide in 500 water/alcohol with sodium carbonate....

totally fogged negative

DarkroomExperimente · Mar 31, 2012

testing Shallot developer again tonight...

this time the ground-up shallots were soaked in water only ( no isopropyl alcohol ) for 4 days

after 30 min I removed half of the film...NO sepia tone...faint negative image

will remove the rest of the film after a few more hours

....also...instead of dumping out the ground-up shallots after draining the fluid, I put them back in the container and added 99% isopropyl alcohol...and will later test that

SO...it seems that whatever generates the sepia tone might be soluble in alcohol but not water (?!?)

the adventure continues

DarkroomExperimente · Mar 31, 2012

after 3.5 hours got a decent negative with the shallot developer w/ some fog

but it's still a negative and NO sepia tint

saw an interesting thread speculating about using onions as a fixer and/or dogicide:

http://photo.net/black-and-white-photo-film-processing-forum/00UOno

the mystery continues

DarkroomExperimente · Apr 2, 2012

Progress:

soaking shallots in WATER: negative image, no amber/sepia tone

soaking shallots in 99% ALCOHOL: no image, strong amber tone

DarkroomExperimente · Apr 6, 2012

just ran another test...as close to the first run as possible...seems like I might have positive images again...but won't be sure until film is dry

pulled one strip out after an hour...there is more film still in the developer to come out later

DarkroomExperimente · Apr 6, 2012

Yup.....positive images again...so that first experiment wasn't a fluke

I'll post a few images tomorrow when the film is dry

Direct Positive sepia-toned slide with Shallot-based developer

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