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Kitchen Cupboard Fix

thuggins

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Since coffee can be used as a developer and vinegar or citric acid as a stop, I was wondering if there are any common household or kitchen chemicals that can be used for the fix. According to the interwebs, silver bromide is soluble in ammonia, but it is not clear if this is suitable as a fix.
 

Rudeofus

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You can fix Silver Chloride with Ammonia, but not Silver Bromide. And I'd rather have Sodium Thiosulfate in my kitchen cupboard than Ammonia ....
 

glbeas

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Get your sodium thiosufate and sodium sulfire to make fixer from your local pool supply.
 

MattKing

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I wonder if the title for this thread is being indexed by Google and other search engines as being something about "home improvement"!?
One can argue that the invention of modern, chemical based photography was in essence the discovery of fixer.
I don't think you will find anything in the kitchen or laundry or cleaning cupboard that will also fix film or paper.
 

BAC1967

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I fixed the image below with iodized table salt. I mixed up 225g of iodized table salt into 750ml of distilled water (equivalent to 300g salt in 1L). It takes a lot of stirring to get that much salt dissolved. After adding the salt solution to the film I agitated it every now and then for 48 hours. The agitation was not on a regular schedule, just whenever I happened by and remembered. Usually I did 30 agitations then went about my business. I may have gone longer than I needed to, I have read that it can be done in less time.

Hosta by Bryan Chernick, on Flickr
 

BAC1967

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This one was developed in Caffenol C-L/S for 70 minutes and fixed in a salt water solution for 48 hours. Kodak Super-XX Pan 4x5 film expired September, 1980. The one above is Ilford Delta 100 developed the same way. Fixing in salt didn't remove the coffee stain very well, if it was scanned in color you would see a brownish tone to it. That may be good if you want a sepia tone.

Clematis in Caffenol by Bryan Chernick, on Flickr
 

Rudeofus

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A combination of things will happen if you treat your film with table salt:
  1. Some silver will be dissolved as a water soluble silver chloride complexes [AgCl2]-, [AgCl3]--, [AgCl4]---. These complexes are stable and will compete with Bromide for silver ions. With enough salt present the balance will be towards silver chloride complexes and the film may clear.
  2. Some silver ions will react with the iodide in table salt to form Silver Iodide. Silver Iodide is stable as long as it is not exposed to light. Decades ago Kodak and other experimented with stabilizers, i.e. compounds which would retain undeveloped silver in the emulsion but tied into a compound which did not interfere with enlargement. AFAIK none of these stabilizers achieved archival results.
@BAC1967 : it would be interesting how your salt fixed clips respond to an hour of direct sunlight.
 

pentaxuser

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MattKing said:
I wonder if the title for this thread is being indexed by Google and other search engines as being something about "home improvement"!?
Click to expand...

This had me smiling. We could do with a bit more gentle humour on Photrio these days. A throw-away line beats throwing away relationships any day

pentaxuser
 

darkroommike

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I have also read that ammonia makes a pretty good fast fixer but I'd only want to use it outdoors!
As fas a salt, sodium chloride, fixers--I suspect that complete fixation is not possible if your emulsion contains bromides or especially iodides. It would also be useful to actually test one of these "fixed" negatives by exposing it first to window light and then redeveloping the negative in a strong developer like Dektol. That would be a pretty good indicator of the efficiency of the fixation.
 

BAC1967

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It's seems everyone wants me to ruin my negative. I may put it in sunlight but I won't be home to do that until next week. I have no expectation that fixing with salt would be archival, I only did it on the two negatives to see if it would work. I travel a lot for work and develop film in my hotel so I wanted to see if there was a way to fix with something I could easily get. So far I haven't needed to do that. If someone has some other home brew method like the OP was asking about I would be interested.
 

darkroommike

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If your negative is fixed, putting it in sunlight will not ruin it, if it isn't fixed, after a week in a saturated solution of sodium chloride, you wasted a week. Making a distinction here between cleared and fixed.
 

Rudeofus

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BAC1967's negatives may not be properly fixed, but they may be stabilized. He's free to properly fix them at some later point in time. BTW plain sodium hypo is solid, and it is much more benign than any film/paper developer you can possibly come up with, including Caffenol and Xtol.
 

Ces1um

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That's a beautiful photo btw...
 
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