The quest for grocery development

[wartree]

So after i played a bit with caffenol, i am in a quest to find a homemade fixer, for a start i suppose anything i'll come up with will be super slow, like one hour and up of waiting, because naturally we cant create concentrated substances with grocery products. In black and white processing the main function of the fixer is to wash away unexposed silver particles, i need to find a chemical or a mixture of regular grocery substances that have affinity with silver halides, i know it will be kinda of impossible, but i would be cool if so.

 

[Nicholas Lindan]

If you use silver chloride emulsions - salted paper prints or contact paper - then table salt makes a hugely inefficient fixer.

For regular bromide/iodide emulsions you can use cyanide from peach pits, but peach pits contain hydrogen cyanide bound to sugar and traditionally potassium cyanide is used for fixing. Might be worth it to try peach-pit juice just to see what happens - also bitter almonds, mango pits and apple seeds.

Fixer can be made from thiourea, but the feedstock for making thiourea is cyanide so you are right back where you started.

 

[wartree]

currently i am shooting c-41 and developing bw, what kind of emulsion does c-41 have ?

 

[Aurum]

C41 uses silver halides like standard B&W. Its different in that its a multiple layers and has dye couplers in there, but it can be developed as B&W with most standard Black and white developers, so in theory you could use caffinol to do the job if you were in the mood.

The only downside is that the negs may not be as dense as typical B&W ones, and a lot of C41 have an orange base which can be a PITA to print off using standard mono paper.

That said, there are threads on here where people have got good results using Rodinal 100:1 stand developing for 1 hour, so I may be talking crud.

Ilford XP2 is a C41 B&W film with a clear base. May work well in this case.

If in doubt try and see what you get. Could be a giggle at least

 

[ntenny]

Neither is exactly a "grocery" product, but ammonium thiosulfate (aka rapid fixer) is used as a fertiliser, and sodium thiosulfate (hypo) is apparently available as some sort of swimming-pool chemical. This question comes up here somewhat regularly, and these two candidates are the most promising ones I remember seeing.

-NT