Weirdest developing technique you've ever heard of

What is it? Mine is either developing in coffee or this one guy who took a

bunch of pictures with a toy camera, onto polaroid film, blew them up to giant

size, and coated them with resin. It looked really cool.

Sam Houston was a AP photographer who used to use our darkroom at my paper to develop and print film when he was in town. He used to shoot tri-x film at ASA 1600 and would develop the film in Dektol developer at a 100 degrees for 30 sec. constant agitation. He always had a image to print on deadline, even if the grain was the size of the players eyes.I swear you could hear the film screaming as he poured it into the tank.

Even stranger, I know a guy who says he unrolls the film and spreads it around in a bowl of developer, agitating by stirring it with his hands. Says it comes out fine. Question for Michael Ging. When the film screamed was it a soprano? Do the slower speeds scream in the lower octaves?

<cite>I swear you could hear the film screaming as he poured it into the tank.</cite>

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Tank? We don't need no steenkin' tank! One of the photographers at the paper I used to work for did the Tri-X in Dektol thing, but just used the Dektol that was already in the trays for paper developing. He'd put one hand on each end of the film, and swish back and forth, first left hand up/right hand down, then right hand up/left down, with the middle loop of the film immersed in the tray. Throw it in the fixer, turn the lights on, wait for it to clear, rinse for a second, then if there was time, blow it dry with a hair dryer, otherwise print it while wet.

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Results were as ugly as you'd expect, and the negatives would often stain in only a few weeks, but the prints were done by deadline. A coarse halftone screen and cheap newsprint covers up quite a few sins.

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But that's not so much a weird technique as a technique that's optimized for speed at the expense of quality; a reasonable bargain for some photojournalism, at least in the days before digital. Weird technique? <a href="http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/172/8/1002">Using urine as a developer</a>. Weirder than coffee, at least.

Bruce, I did start out as a Normal tenor ,but quickly sounded like a castrato tenor. You do not want to ask ................

Rumor has it cigarette ash was an integral additive to the developer for W. Eugene Smith's images.

I did meet him when he was teaching at the U of A in Tuscon before he died.He would play Classic music very loud as he printed,used a lot of Potassium ferricynide to bring up the highlights. I was able to print a photo of Albert Schweitzer he shot in Africa. The Negative was not the best in the world, but he could get a great print out of it.He was in a lot of Pain at the end of his life,some of it from war wounds and from the many times he was beaten up while taking photos, I think alcohol helped him deal with it and in the end it killed him.

I seem to recall a story about how some people used water from Lake Erie ( or was it Lake

Michigan? ) instead of a film developer to process film - well, one of the Great Lakes, anyway.

The thing I most recall about that though, was a joke that Johnny Carson had about that story

- "Big deal. Here in L.A. we develop film by waving it in the air."

Cigarette ash, and ash from other smokable substances also, were integral to the print developer in the student darkroom at the San Francisco Art Institute when I studied there in the late 60s. Didn't seem to harm anything.

 

Imogen Cunningham was the Artist in Residence at that time, and she often complained that she couldn't work in the darkroom without getting high. Don't know if that was a complaint or compliment ;-)

 

<Chas>

Chlorophyl, sunshine and time. Positive attached to a leaf and left for several months. Permanent image.

OK, this isn't a wet-darkroom trick, but the weirdest "digital printing" trick I've seen was a local photographer who (half-way through outputing a B/W image on his printer) shoves the whole unit into a hot oven. This delivers a variety of effects, including solarization and (in one case) totally inverting the grayscale tones in the "hot" half of the image. (It also achieves "artistic justifications" for buying new printers.)

 

Weird.

 

Dave

The darkroom I had available to me was mainly used for 4x5 work, so there were 4x5

development buckets, but nothing for 35mm. I put the exposed film on a spool, and dunked

it (by hand) into the buckets to agitate. I'm sure I absorbed all sorts of poisons in the

process. The developer left a filmy coat on my hands, but the stop took it right off and felt

pretty good. At least until the acid hit some nicks in my skin. owowowowow. It defintely

made it a real 'hands-on' experience.