ive got chemicals but no clue what to do with them

its a waste if you ask me... so i thought i would ask all you nice people

i am in a photography class here at college, and our assignment is to use alternative methods for creating prints... unlike everyone else i would really like to branch out a bit and try something more interesting and complex than solarization and toning.

so i was looking through the dusty boxes of chemicals hidden in our darkroom and found a bunch of stuff... the problem is i don't know what to do with them :confused:

i attached a list of chemicals i have besides the ordinary developer, stop bath, fixer and toners.


... the only thing i could even figure out how to do with all this was use the hydroquinone in a solution with vitamin c and washing soda to get a developer

anyone know anything interesting that can be done with this stuff plus common chemicals i could get easily? effects... processes... anything really

i would just order some stuff online but i don't have a credit card and i don't have the time to wait for the shipping because its due next thursday


....oh and i live pretty much in Detroit if anyone knows any good chemical suppliers for anything useful near by???

Well, the potassium bromide and ferricyanide can go together to make a rehalogenating bleach. If you feel like doing something with colour, you can use it with (there was a url link here which no longer exists) to obtain a very high EI with a unique look. It's on the list of things for me to try when I have time...

The potassium permangenate can be used to make a non-rehalogenating bleach with sulphuric acid. This type of bleach is used in black and white reversal processing. If you do a search you can find more on this.

rather than use a bunch of chemicals you are not familiar with (and could be dangerous to you or others), why not try more common material? For example, you can develop black & white film using coffee and washing soda?

There is some very nasty, hazardous, toxic stuff in that list (e.g., the lead and mercury compounds-best to leave alone), and the rest not much of any use except for toning prints.

You might be able to use the thiocyanates to do chromoskedasic painting or chromoskedasic duotone solarization if you can find a recipe. Here's a link to a few examples of chromoskedasic photos. There was an extensive article in Scientific American in the early 90s (I think) on the process. Google for "William Jolly", "Dominic Lam" or "Pierre Cordier" and "chimigramme" and something should turn up.

If you could obtain some green ferric ammonium citrate you could combine that with the potassium ferricyanide to make cyanotypes or blue-tone prints.

One drop of Mercuric Chloride can kill You, your Dog, your Neighbors dog, and still have enough left over to kill a few Rabbits.
Best to leave the schools chemistry where you found it.

"Sordid" Borate is just hilarious though.

SORDID:
1) Involving ignoble actions or motives; arousing moral distaste and contempt.

"Zounds! That Borate reminds me of nothing more than dogs in heat!"

thanks for the ideas. i will definitely have to look into those.... i would do the cyanotypes but i have already been trying to find a source for the ferric ammonium citrate and am failing miserably

and i would like to say first that if i can get some recipes to do things with common household things i would... but also i would like to utilize what i have access too... ya know?

and second i am not an idiot (not that you were implying that).... i have done a fair bit of research on most of the chemicals listed ... enough to know that mercury bichloride (for example) can kill you if you inhale the fumes or ingest it, and that it's coorosive (i would never mess with that).... and in addition the sulfuric acid reacts exothermically if you add it to water.

finding out how dangerous chemicals are is easy... finding a use for them is not


thanks for the concern for my well being though

I second the motion on watching out for some of that stuff. The thiorea, for example, is a known carcinogen. Some of it I know to be really old--the Flemish toner, for example, is an old Ansco product--and a very good selenium-type toner, btw. And unless your professor is at least sixty five years old, with lots of prior photo experience, don't trust him/her to know what to do with some of those chemcials, except for how to dispose of them properly.

John, Mount Vernon, Virginia USA

Welcome to APUG.

Just order the small cyanotype kit from photographers formulary. Bleach the print in dilute ammonia, and tone in tea. Likely nobody else will have anything like it, because most would leave a cyanotype blue, not realizing they can tone it. It can look very elegant.

perhaps i should correct my original question .....

know any good things i can do with the chemicals on this list that aren't likely to result in people dieing?

i am not going to try using them if i cant find out information on them (and they are not overly dangerous), and a recipe to use them in.

seriously i realize that a bunch of theses are poisonous (as are many chemicals) but also that some are very very very dangerous

my first thought when i looked threw the stuff was that i should tell my teacher some of this crap is in here so he can get rid of it :rolleyes:

Some of the toners might be useful. It sounds like it may be very old. IMO most of it should be properly disposed of. The citric acid could be used, but big woo. You indicated that you wanted to branch out and do something different. None of these chemicals are particularly useful for that end, with your experience and likely curriculum considered. I would look to a "normal" alternative process.

Okay, bear with me, I am going to go into lecturing/professorial mode here. This will sound very extreme, what I am about to say, but bear with me because my lab can be shut down in a blink if I or one of my students gets harmed.

Put on gloves and a respirator and move all the chemicals to a dry, safe area. If it were I, this would be a dry, solvent-free fume hood. This is your "unknowns" zone. Everythting goes there until you have complete knowledge of all the hazards. One by one you read through the MSDS sheets and take each item out of the unknowns zone and transport it back to your darkroom. This takes time.

Some of these things have no business in your darkroom. Do not assume that they do, you have to go through item by item and make sure they are safe and that you really need them. Do not allow things like intensifiers and whatnot to accumulate even if the packaging looks intact. Make sure you understand very well what can and cannot be stored side by side, what should be stored dry, etc.

I recently went into an old darkroom of a deceased colleague; he had literally a half century of potions. Quite a famous alchemist was Jack Mitchell, he modernized our understanding of the silver halide process after Gurney and Mott. Anyway, Jack had some stuff that I won't even mention for fear of an OSHA raid! Good lord, what a stash had our Jack.

Just be careful, and if there is something that you do not understand 100%, regard it as carcinogenic, mutagenic, teratogenic, kill-you-instantly-genic... take no chances.

And if perchance you are a pregnant female then get a male co-worker to do all of the above for you

When you do get a disposal pile together, make sure you dispose of the items properly and individually. Most accidents are cause by people getting a big pail and summarily dumping all the unknowns into that pail. All you have to do is watch the pH and wash it down with water, right? Wrong! Do I have stories about that kind of nonsense...

Keith;

Very sane advice.

First off though, get rid of the Lead salt using a hazmat disposal site recognized by your community. It has no business in your lab and cannot be disposed of other than by a professional.

PE

markbb said:

rather than use a bunch of chemicals you are not familiar with (and could be dangerous to you or others), why not try more common material? For example, you can develop black & white film using coffee and washing soda?

Click to expand...

smieglitz said:

There is some very nasty, hazardous, toxic stuff in that list (e.g., the lead and mercury compounds-best to leave alone), and the rest not much of any use except for toning prints.

Click to expand...

Many of those chamicals are common and have a perfectly good place in a darkroom. So I would plead for a less all-encompassing deletion of the list the original poster has presented.

That said, the very first thing that needs to happen is to get rid of the mercuric chloride, the other mercury compound, the lead compound and maybe a couple of others.

Despite his very appropriate cautions, I have to disagree with Keith Williams about any further handling of the worst of the chamicals and doing disposal yourself. I urge you to prevail upon your photo darkroom's teacher to get the college chemistry department to immediately remove the couple of hyper-toxic materials. They will know how to deal with such materials. Don't go handling the real bad guys yourself at all. I'm sorry to this sound like this but - Hands off! Disposal of such items is a specialized field.

Those few materials have no place in a situation where untrained people could stumble across them.

I'm not sure whether the rest of that list makes for a good starting point for some good photo experimentation. It is sort of a cats and dogs list other than having a strength in toners. One possibility would be to dig up a copy of Tim Rudman's excellent book on toning. Multiple toning techniques are a real possibility.

The Photographer's Toning Book: The Definitive Guide by Tim Rudman from Amphoto Books 2003 ISBN: 9780817454654

More info on toning in that one book than I have found anywhere else. And it could be a fun project.

C

CBG said:

Despite his very appropriate cautions, I have to disagree with Keith Williams about any further handling of the worst of the chamicals and doing disposal yourself. I urge you to prevail upon your photo darkroom's teacher to get the college chemistry department to immediately remove the couple of hyper-toxic materials. They will know how to deal with such materials. Don't go handling the real bad guys yourself at all. I'm sorry to this sound like this but - Hands off! Disposal of such items is a specialized field.

Click to expand...

I absolutely agree, definitely. Thanks for clarifying that. I did not mean to imply that the OP should do any actual disposal him/herself. All that he/she can do is is ascertain what needs to be taken away versus that which he/she might keep. By the looks of it there are some items there that need to be handled professionally. Ron is right too. Bottom line is, some of these things really need to be taken care of professionally. And indeed most schools have professional disposal experts who can do this by the books; I would be very loathe to take any dated chemicals into private possession. Proper disposal of some of these things can be expensive.

Please don't interpret my cautions as enviro-hysteria or whatever! It's just that some of the nastiest of the nasties could be found in older darkrooms, in my experience. It simply takes a lot of patience to go through it all- and you should leave nothing to guesswork, nothing! That which is unlabeled should be treated most cautiously of all.