Who formulates their developer?

[rodeo_joe1]

Thanks again Ben.

That experiment seems pretty conclusive.

I'll do a few experiments of my own with some bits of twig, caustic soda and some ancient FP4 that's no use for anything else. I have some ascorbic acid to speed things up if I find an interesting plant.

 

I suspect the hop plant might have a good concentration of caffeic acid. So beeranol or lagernol might be among the candidates.

Cheers!

[rodeo_joe1]

Tom said: "One practical advantage Caffenol has, is that now that I've purchased the ingredients I have enough to last me a very long time given that I only need to mix as much as I need."

 

The same thing could be said for "proper" photo chemicals, and so we come full circle to the topic of this thread.

 

I have a jar of phenidone that I obtained many years -no, decades- ago. It still works just fine. Ascorbic acid is readily obtainable from health-food stores, and almost any alkali can be used as an accelerator. So making up a developer can be done just as easily with raw chemicals as with groceries of unknown strength.

It's the hardware, like developing tanks and changing bags that are in danger of becoming scarce and unobtainable. I know from experience that changing bags don't have an indefinite life, and your average film novice these days isn't going to bother making a darkroom.

 

The negatives, after processing, will likely be scanned rather than enlarged onto bromide paper, and simply end up as a digital file that might as well have been taken with a digital camera.

And what's the point of that, really?

Edited June 21, 2017 by rodeo_joe|1

[tomspielman]

For now the hardware is easy enough find and I imagine it will be for quite some time. I picked up my first stainless steel development reel and tank for $5.00 from craigslist. Even if it becomes hard to find new, there will be a decades supply of used stuff available on eBay and other places.

 

As far as changing bags go, there are DIY options already, though I'd much rather use a purpose made one.

 

Since phenidone is primarily used for photography and it's not something that can be used repeatedly like a developing tank, I think it would be the more likely thing to be difficult to obtain in the future. I don't think there should be any immediate concern and one could always do what you did, - buy a bunch of it.

 

I think as long as film is being made, there will be ways to develop it.

 

It is a valid question. If the end product is digital, then why shoot film? A scanner is really just a specialized digital camera after all. But, to me there's a marked difference between an image shot on film vs a digital camera regardless of whether it ends up being scanned or not.

Edited June 21, 2017 by tomspielman

[rodeo_joe1]

I've always agreed with Ansel Adams, insomuch as he compared a negative to a music score, and the print to the performance.

 

I really see no difference between a RAW file from a digital camera and a film negative in this respect. Both depend on a well-judged exposure, and both can be adjusted to a degree during "development".

 

However, when it comes to the print I find 16 bit digital manipulation straight from the camera like being able to play on a Stradivarius or Steinway, as opposed to the Chinese beginner's fiddle or battered upright of scanning or enlarging. And I spent nigh on 40 years fiddling about enlarging!

Edited June 21, 2017 by rodeo_joe|1

[ben_hutcherson]

FWIW, I added more sodium carbonate to my caffeic acid+AgI mixture and let it sit with stirring overnight(I did that right before I left for work).

 

 

Oh, by the way I'm sorry @dieter_schafer for not acquiesing to a chemical engineer's demand/opinion that we should only use systematic names in both chemistry and photography. This is a mixture of Sodium carbonate, Silver iodide, and 3-(3,4-Dihydroxyphenyl)-2-propenoic acid .

 

The first was a mixture of Sodium carbonate, Silver iodide, 3-(3,4-Dihydroxyphenyl)-2-propenoic acid, and 1,3,7-Trimethylpurine-2,6-dione.

[glen_h]

I am not sure now about washing soda (sodium carbonate) but I believe it is for clothes washing, and that tells where to find it in the store.

 

It might be for hard water, that it helps to add it in that case. That would be more obvious with soap than detergent.

 

I would expect vitamin C to be easy to find, as since Pauling suggested it is good for colds, people have been buying it in large quantities.

Seems like later research shows it doesn't help much, but people still use it. Other vitamins, not so easy.

[tomspielman]

I am not sure now about washing soda (sodium carbonate) but I believe it is for clothes washing, and that tells where to find it in the store.

 

It might be for hard water, that it helps to add it in that case. That would be more obvious with soap than detergent.

 

I would expect vitamin C to be easy to find, as since Pauling suggested it is good for colds, people have been buying it in large quantities.

Seems like later research shows it doesn't help much, but people still use it. Other vitamins, not so easy.

 

I'm sure 30 or 40 years ago there were plenty of people who knew exactly what washing soda was good for but it's been largely replaced by other products. In any case it is disappearing from store shelves. I think you may find it more often in hardware stores than grocery stores now.

 

Vitamin C tablets and pills can be found in grocery stores but they aren't 100% Vitamin C. For powder you'll probably need to go to specialty store. In my case I bought the tablets that had the fewest other ingredients besides Vitamin-C. I put some in a couple of baggies and smashed them with a hammer. It worked well enough but if your goal is to control the ingredients with a lot of precision, it's probably not the best solution.

[glen_h]

If sodium carbonate is too hard to find, mix sodium bicarbonate and sodium hydroxide, both of which should be easy to find.

 

If you heat bicarbonate, I am not sure which comes off first, water or carbon dioxide.

 

I suppose the markup on washing soda is lower than on other laundry products. I will have to look next time I shop.

 

Sodium carbonate is also used for dying, such as tie-dye, and should be available where you get tie-dye products.

Maybe also in the dye section of grocery stores. It helps dye stick to cloth.

[rodeo_joe1]

"...and should be available where you get tie-dye products."

 

Right! I'll just nip back to the late 1960s and find my nearest tie-dye emporium.

 

Finding a ready source of alkali accelerator is no problem. Borax, washing soda, bicarb+caustic soda, Boric acid+caustic soda will all do the job.

 

What's not so easy to find is sodium sulphite to use as a grain reducer and anti-oxidant to improve the keeping qualities of a home-brew developer. For this you can use sodium metabisulphite, sold as a wine preservative and for sterilising food vessels, with the addition of caustic soda.

 

The proportions of 8 parts anhydrous caustic soda to 19 parts anhydrous sodium metabisulphite by weight yields 25.2 parts of sodium sulphite. E.g. if a formula calls for 50 grams of sodium sulphite, simply substitute 16gms of caustic soda + 38gms of sodium metabisulphite. (I know that 16+38 is more than 50.4 - the rest becomes water)

[glen_h]

For now the hardware is easy enough find and I imagine it will be for quite some time. I picked up my first stainless steel development reel and tank for $5.00 from craigslist. Even if it becomes hard to find new, there will be a decades supply of used stuff available on eBay and other places.

 

As far as changing bags go, there are DIY options already, though I'd much rather use a purpose made one.

 

Good quality changing bags are on eBay, new and mailed directly from China, for about USD 14.00 including shipping.

 

I bought one a few years ago, and expect it to last many years.

 

I don't know if any US companies still sell them (even if made in China).

[tomspielman]

There's quite a few bags available on Amazon.

 

I think if you're wondering how the decline of film will play out for those that still want to use it, look at the world of Super 8 movie film. That market started to rapidly decline a couple of decades earlier than still film due to the transition to magnetic tape. Relatively few people ever processed their own movie film but the tanks are available to those who are interested and willing to pay for them. However, I don't know that any are being made new.

 

The real problem is film. It was all about reversal (positive) film in that market, but Kodak no long makes a color reversal film. They are supposedly bringing ektachrome back. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. But another problem is that they haven't sold any film with a sound stripe in a long time. So, if you want sound, it has to be captured and synced from an external source. Not super easy with a traditional camera since the filming speed was not very precise.

 

Kodak expects film to be scanned now, so what is being sold is negative film. Getting quality high scans of 8mm film isn't an easy thing to do yourself. The best way to do it is frame by frame and the equipment capable of doing that is pricey.

 

Happily for the people in this forum, I think B&W film will be available for a long, long time, but probably not in all the formats and varieties we'd like.

Edited June 22, 2017 by tomspielman

[ben_hutcherson]

Happily for the people in this forum, I think B&W film will be available for a long, long time, but probably not in all the formats and varieties we'd like.

 

Well, Ilford still is doing an annual run of ULF, although you have to custom order and it's not cheap. They just finished taking orders for this year's batch, and I think estimated delivery is in the fall.

 

Similarly, Kodak will cut any current emulsion to any size you want, but you have to buy the entire master reel. I've known folks who have gone together and bought one in 16x20 or whatever.

 

A friend of mine tells me that Super 8 is actually seeing a bit of a renaissance and good quality Super 8 cameras are fetching decent money these days. It should tell us something that the new Ektachrome is initially being released in 35mm and Super 8. I'd have thought 120 would take precedence over Super 8(I'm more likely to buy a roll of film to try it in 120 than 35mm, but then I may be one of the few people around who feels that way) but none the less that's going to be the initial production.

[tomspielman]

I forgot who it was on these forums but I know there is at least one person who doesn't like applying the term "analog" to film. So forgive me for the moment, but a number of "analog" technologies are experiencing a renaissance right now including vinyl albums, cassette tapes, Super 8, and just film in general. I don't know if that's something that will last. Kodak is even going to sell a Super 8 camera.

 

My guess is that Kodak still gets a great deal of revenue from 35mm and sometimes even 70mm movie film. They want to make sure that future generations of movie makers will still want to choose film and that won't happen unless you make it more accessible to those that are up and coming, - hence the development of a Super 8 camera and bundling in processing with the purchase of film (part of their plans).

[rodeo_joe1]

I'll accept groove cutting in plastic as "analog", but film is actually more digital than a digital camera.

 

Film "grains" or dye clouds are either present or not in the processed emulsion. The impression of continuous tonality or hue is simply created by random dithered spots merged in the eye.

 

Looking at colour film, for example, the eye is presented with Cyan, Magenta and Yellow dye blobs of maybe 2 to 3 microns in diameter and overlaid in an emulsion around 12 microns thick. If you take a 10 micron square sample of colour film and take zero dye blobs as pure white, a bit of maths shows us it's impossible to squeeze more than a few hundred dye clouds into that volume to exhibit a few hundred different colours at most. Therefore a similar size of digital pixel capable of showing 16.7 million (2^24) different colours is, in my view, far more analogue in nature.

 

And I can't think of anything more likely to put off budding movie makers than the abysmal technical quality of Super-8 film!

Edited June 23, 2017 by rodeo_joe|1

[tomspielman]

Now I remember who it was. ;)

 

I agree with you. I've argued the same point.

 

Another forum I frequent (though not as much lately) is a forum devoted to Super 8. There are lots of collectors there who would disagree with you on the technical quality comment but there's no escaping the fact that if you're used to working with 35mm or larger films, Super 8 is tiny by comparison. Further, the way the cartridges were designed led to poor film registration in most cameras. A few managed to work around the inherent problem. Zoom lenses became popular on Super 8 cameras but unfortunately image stabilization wasn't available.

 

Anyway, depending on what it is you're trying to accomplish the image quality can be very acceptable, or the lack of it might even be desirable.

[rodeo_joe1]

The re-introduction of 9.5mm film cartridges having the same frame size as 16mm I could -almost- understand.

 

What next? Disk film and 110?

 

Seriously, unless Kodak are going to re-introduce K'chrome 25 and re-open their processing labs, what private company in its right mind is going to tool up to process half a dozen cartridges a year of bootlace?

 

Even then, people are going to want it digitised so that they can watch it "properly" on a TV set. Jeez! The world gets more insane by the day.

Edited June 23, 2017 by rodeo_joe|1

[tomspielman]

The re-introduction of 9.5mm film cartridges having the same frame size as 16mm I could -almost- understand.

 

What next? Disk film and 110?

 

Seriously, unless Kodak are going to re-introduce K'chrome 25 and re-open their processing labs, what private company in its right mind is going to tool up to process half a dozen cartridges a year of bootlace?

 

Even then, people are going to want it digitised so that they can watch it "properly" on a TV set. Jeez! The world gets more insane by the day.

 

Kodak is going to start bundling processing and scanning into the price of the film. That is their plan. Whether they follow through or not remains to be seen. People are widening the gates on existing cameras to shoot "Max 8" and supposedly Kodak's new camera will be able to do that as well. It widens the image to a 16:9 aspect ratio by using the part of the film that was set aside for a sound stripe.

 

I'm not saying that means a huge jump in image quality, just that it will fit properly on modern displays vs a traditional home projector screen. So there are really people that still do this stuff. Apparently having your wedding filmed in Super 8 is also now a thing.

[glen_h]

I'll accept groove cutting in plastic as "analog", but film is actually more digital than a digital camera.

 

Film "grains" or dye clouds are either present or not in the processed emulsion. The impression of continuous tonality or hue is simply created by random dithered spots merged in the eye.

(snip)

 

Then analog tape is also digital, as each bit of iron oxide is magnetized one way or the other. The applied field and AC bias sets an appropriate number of them magnetized in the desired direction, in proportion to the input signal.

 

And the groove in vinyl recordings is made up of individual atoms that are either there or not.

 

When these signals get to our eyes and ears, nerve impulses are generated, or not, at the appropriate time.

 

Currents and voltages consist of an integer number of electrons moving through, or sitting in, some piece of metal.

 

As for dye clouds, the amount of dye depends on the amount of oxidized color developer reaching the dye coupler spot. Grains are present or not, but dye clouds can have variable density, though in integer number of dye molecules. In normal contrast films, there is a wide range of grain sizes, to allow for a somewhat continuous variation.

 

One of my old favorite quantum physics problems ask how many different speeds a baseball pitcher can throw a baseball in a given size of baseball stadium. Momentum is quantized when a particle is in a box of a given size. The answer depends on the mass of the ball, the maximum speed, and the size of the stadium. (Vertically, without a roof, it depends on gravity and the maximum speed.) Quantum mechanics quantizes many things that we think should be continuous.

[rodeo_joe1]

"but dye clouds can have variable density,"

 

- Not so. The dye couplers are contained in oily globules to keep them discrete from the gelatine substrate. Each dye globule is chemically engineered to be fairly tightly controlled for size and to be immobile within the gelatine matrix. Otherwise the dyestuffs would migrate between colour layers and cross contaminate each other.

 

The dye cloud size is also tightly regulated to minimise the appearance of granularity.

 

Even if the dye coupler were to be evenly dispersed, its activation would be dependent on the size of halide crystal adjacent to it, and the halide crystals too are regulated in size to maintain the rated speed of the film.

 

Given a little time I can show you photomicrographs of dye clouds that show how uniform in size they are, and how discrete they are from each other.

 

I don't make this stuff up without any evidence.

[glen_h]

I don't know about the size or distribution of globules vs. silver halide grains, but for normal contrast films, grains come in a variety of sizes.

 

I also don't know how far oxidized developer can diffuse before finding a coupler.

 

I do agree that globule size should be fairly constant. If one is next to a large grain, then much of the dye will be generated by that grain.

Next to a smaller grain, it should have less dye. Unless globules outnumber grains by a huge factor, which I don't expect.

[tomspielman]

A recent youtube video shot in Super 8.

 

 

Certainly not the pinnacle of image quality, but again, depending on what it is you're after, might be a reasonable choice.

[glen_h]

Movies are interesting. While the image quality of a single frame might not be so good, especially at 8mm, when watched as a movie, much of it averages out. The grain (or dye clouds) of individual frames averages to a reasonably smooth result.

 

(Maybe from the front row, you can see grain effects.)

[tomspielman]

Yeah, they are are interesting. By design any single frame captured while something is moving will not look very sharp. A certain amount of motion blur is necessary, otherwise the resulting movie will look choppy.

[rodeo_joe1]

"...grains come in a variety of sizes."

 

- The thing is that nobody seems to know that for sure!

 

I've read every treatise I can find on the mechanism of development (that's not many), and none of them seem able to agree on exactly what happens during the development process, and exactly what form the reduced silver takes.

 

Best "guess" is by Ilford's chemists, who say that metallic silver filaments are extruded from the surface of the halide crystal. The filaments may travel some distance from their point of origin, or may curl back on themselves to form small balls. The speed of development influences the physical form of those silver filaments; with slower development keeping the filaments tighter to their point of origin, and therefore more compact.

 

In this model there would be little relationship between the size of the original crystal and the apparent size of the silver filament. Since the area of filament presented normal to the film would depend on its direction of growth, as well as its shape and volume.

 

This tallies reasonably well with the spidery tangle seen when viewing a developed B&W film through a microscope. It doesn't alter the fact that the image is made up of totally opaque parts with translucent areas in between.

 

All quite interesting, but ultimately quite pointless to know or worry about unless you're an emulsion chemist. Not many of them about today I'll hazard to guess.

Edited June 26, 2017 by rodeo_joe|1

[robert_ante]

Fifty or so years ago I used and formulated a great many developers. Nowadays I use rodinal almost exclusively for bw still photography but do mix D19 for super 8 and 16 mm because there is less waste, since I can never use up a gallon before it goes bad. I used to do E6 for still film but machine processing is best for movie film.

Yet, some of the formulas mentioned by various contributors and their comments sound intriguing so maybe....