Friday, February 12, 2016

More caffenol

I loaded the frozen roll of Tri-X into my Compact 120 6x9cm camera and gave development with Caffenol another shot.  Since I had pretty bad base fogging on the last roll, this time I used the Caffenol C-H recipe from The Caffenol Cookbook and Bible, recommended for use with faster films. The recipe calls for Potassium Bromide as a restrainer, but somewhere else on the internet I saw a note you could use plain old table salt, just ten times as much. The recipe calls for one gram of KBr so that's not as extreme as it sounds.

The base fogging was a little better.  Here is an old 35mm negative on top, compared to the previous roll on the left, and the new roll on the right.  It still looks like I have a ways to go.  I also think I may be fogging the film a little when I'm loading it.  Several negatives had what looked more like a light leak than overexposure. The next roll I'm going to try to load the camera in the changing bag to make darn sure that's not the problem.  And it is nearly 10 year old film, but it's been in the freezer the whole time.  If I still have a problem with the next roll, I think I'll have to buy a new roll of film to compare it to.

I did get a couple halfway decent shots, but nothing ready for exhibition yet.

I returned to the south kitchen window that had been a major subject when I was using black and white paper negatives.




And, when you can't come up with any other subject matter, a self portrait is always an option.





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