You don't have to develop film

[mbntr]

Pardon the odd title, but it's true! You can take pictures with film without developing them. I am strictly talking about B&W as it wouldn't work for color. This all relies on how film works. Film is made of a polymer base covered in an emulsion, this if made up of halides, usually silver iodide and silver bromide crystals in suspension in gelatin. AgBr and AgI are sensitive to light, they respond to different frequencies, but we can ignore this bit. When a photon hits one of these crystals metallic silver is born, through a process I won't outline as it'd make this whole thing unnecessarily long. When around four or five of these atoms conglomerate you get a "seed" that makes the crystal developable, i.e you can reduce the whole crystal using the seed as a catalyst, to metallic silver... but what if you didn't do that? Developing only amplifies the a latent image (according to a paper from the 1930s by a factor of up to 10^8), but the image is still there, if you expose it long enough a large enough amount of metallic silver is formed to be visible. If my math is right you should do so by around 26-27 stops. 

So this is exactly what I did

This could look a lot better, it's severely underexposed, to the point that you can barely see it, but that's my own fault, I exposed for midday lighting which... doesn't exactly represent average exposure and I still stopped short just out of personal curiosity. Yet there it is, a picture, by exposing better and for longer you can get a better picture, definitely. You get better results if you scan before fixing it, and the image can be fixed, the silver won't be washed away. In my case, I used Fomapan 100 for 4x5 you also need to develop the film later as it's the only way to remove what appears to be a second anti-halation layer (there are two, one is green and water soluble, but if you wash that away with water you'll get a brightly colored pink negative, and to remove that you have to let the film stay in a developer for some seconds). But if you do like me and get a comically underexposed negative, fear not, you didn't get a negative at all! You got a positive! There's so little silver that the way you actually see the image is through the reflected silver and not light being blocked from it, so... under the right light you get a positive!

This is also what you get straight out of the camera

 

[stuart_pratt]

Very interesting, but I think I’ll stick to normal development for the time being!

[Niels - NHSN]

I admire your curiosity. I wish I had the time and energy to play around like that.

I’ll do as @stuart_pratt - stick to the more conventional process for now, but thanks for sharing!

[glen_h]

There used to be a paper, I believe from 3M, but I might have forgotten, that is silver halide based and develops with heat.

It was commonly used for microfilm viewers, but also Tektronix made a printer for its 401x series of graphics terminals that used it.

The Tektronix 4610 printer has a single line CRT that scans as the paper moves by, and then through the heat developer.

[hjoseph7]

Isn't this the old techinque use in Daguerre types ?