One year ago I prepared this developer, an alternative to the famous Rodinal. I wrote then:

Starting from this formula of Donald Qualls.

250 ml Water30 tablets @ 500 mg Acetaminophen50 g Sodium Sulfite (anhydrous)20 g Sodium Hydroxide (anhydrous)
Mix in order indicated, let stand in sealed container 72 hours before using. Keep crystals from bottom of container with liquid when decanting, stir before drawing off concentrate for dilution. Use dilutions and times as for Agfa Rodinal. Use within 30 minutes of dilution.

Sodium Sulfite is not available for me, and may be for others too. So, I propose following recipe:

2x100 ml Water
20 g Sodium Hydroxide
30 tablets @ 500 mg Acetaminophen (Paracetamol)
40 g Sodium Carbonate (Potash)
500 ml Sulfurous Acid at 6% or equivalent to 30 g of pure acid
Preparation:

Solution A:

First of all, with a mortar, transform the Acetaminophen in powder.
Put 100 ml water in a beaker and 20 g Sodium Hydroxide inside and stir. While hot pour the acetaminophen and stir, one tsp each time until all powder is inside. This solution will be brownish. Let the beaker by side, let us call it beaker A.

Solution B:
Put another 100 ml water in another beaker and add 40g Sodium Carbonate and stir. It will not dissolve all but it doesn't matter. Now go on pouring the sulfurous acid slowly because you will get a lot of bubbles. In this reaction CO2 is produce in large quantity. You will end with less than 500 ml of a solution of Sodium sulfite. Put the solution in a pirex jar and heat it to get the CO2 out, stirring with a spoon. Let the solution cool down.

In a 500 ml bottle pour the content of beaker A. Then wash the beaker with solution B and pour in the 500 ml bottle until this is full. You may have more sulfite left but not much. You have now 500 ml of Parodinal. Let it rest for the same 72 hours before use.

When preparing the work solution, take in account that you end with 500 ml instead of the 250 ml of Donald's recipe. So, you need to double the concentration of the solution, instead of 1:100, use 1:50 and so on.

End of citation

I used the last portion of the developer yesterday, the 17-05-2013. The developer was in a room, not climatized, in a light plastic bottle that had RO9 before. The developer worked well until the end, I didn't notice any weakness. When used as paper developer, 1:10 dilution, it stands for more than 24 hoours active.

Direct positive on normal photographic paper

Based on the recipe described by Donald Qualls here, I tried to make direct positive on paper. I had not the recipe present and did the test just by remembering the principle. The essential is to make a first development which gives negative, wash the silver (bleach), exposure of the reminding silver halides that form the positive image and develope again. So I did and I have got some pictures. I need to make some more work, Adjusting exposure and times of the baths. Also I skiped the clearing bath because I didn't remember of it.

Underexposed

Less underexoposed

I used as developer the homemade Parodinal and the bleach as described by Donald Qualls. I can't say why the well exposed pictures remained negatives and only the underexposed suffered inversion. I was just playing a little by feeling with the times and so on. Next time I will follow the original recipe and I might get better results.

The last one looks like a daguerreotype, I like it!

I have a feeling...

When I decided to restart making traditional photography, the first think I did was to buy a 5 liter jerrycan of ammonium thiosulfate, the so called rapid fixer. I intended to use selfmade developers, but at the time I thought there was no way to overcome the use of the fixer of ammonium thiosulfate, other than the unfashionable hypo (sodium thiosulfate). When I was young, I have used hypo and I knew that the time to fix was about 10 minutes. Then the brands start offering rapid fixer (ammonium thiosulfate) and hypo was forgotten.

Now, for a while, when I was still using commercial developers like R09 and Ilfosol 3, I had no problems with the fixer. But since I am using coffee (and vit.C) based developers, I am getting some annoying white spots in the positives which corresponds to opaque deposits on negatives. I discovered that washing very well the negative after the development with caffenol, there were less spots but still some.

To be sure that the combination coffee&ammonium thiosulfate was to blame about the spots I decided to not rinse in between and I had pictures like this:

Coffee+Vit.C developer + Ammonium Thiosulfate fixer

At last, I decided to use the old hypo (sodium thiosulfate) instead of ammonium thiosulfate. The time makes no difference to me. First I had to prepare the sodium thiosulfate boiling a solution of sodium sulfite with sulfur and filtering the product.

The results were very nice, no spots at all, very clean negatives, like this one

Coffee+Vit.C + Sodium Thiosulfate fixer

Going a little more professional

Yesterday I have been replacing the bellows of a Horseman 980 I bought at ebay not so expensive. The bellows were announced at ebay as fitting the horseman but they were a little too large, I hade to use some tricks but finally it is working and no light leaks were found.

The lens I am using is a Wollensack 135 mm f/4,7, in a selfmade lensboard. This lens are very good but I didn'y succeed yet to get the image totally sharp. The lens for horseman need a foccusing cam to let you use the range finder, but this one hasn't and at ebay they sell these small pieces of iron for a lot of money. Someday I build one myself.

So, before going outside, I lost a certain time to find the right position for the focus at infinity. I failed a little, the images could be better.

The horseman takes 10 pics with a 120 film loaded in the back, it may also use film sheets with the right holders.

I used this time my last developer, Caffenol Super Strong (CSS), with splendid results. No fog and no spots and very little grain too. Definitly the spots were a problem with the fixer of ammonium thiosulfate. This time I used sodium thiosulfate and the negatives are completely nice.

A hill of houses

Small expensive bridge

Along the river Lis

Adox, CSS, Shangai and Hypo

As I already told in this blog, I discovered by chance a superaditivity between Caffenol Strong and the color developer CD-4. To the new soup I called Caffenol Super Strong, or simply CSS. I prepared 500 ml of the stock solution and this is enough for 50 films, each using 10ml for a 500ml batch working solution. I am going to add this recipe to the page of recipes of this blog later on.

Looking for cheap films, I ordered some 120 films of the brand Shangai to be exposed in one of the new acquired ADOX Golf 63. I did expose the film in the camera, it was a clear day, I used the f/16 rule. With the shutter speed at 1/200s I used apertures between f/6.3 and f/11. The camera needs an adjustment in the focusing system, the photos are not very sharp.

Using the CSS, I developed the film for 15 minutes in semi-stand, then stop bath of 20% vinagre and finally a fixer made from sodium sulfite and sulfur boiling for half an hour in a glass jar. This is the Sodium Thiosulfate, it is much softer tha Ammonium Thiosulfate and it does not produce the well known white spots that I already reported before.

I think the film was a little underdeveloped (the amount of KBr is critical), instead of 15 minutes, maybe extending to 20, 25 or even 30 minutes. Next time.

Due to bad focus, some spots caused by accident handling the film and so on, I used the software to create some pieces of photoArt. Here are some:

Abandoned house

Milagres, Leiria

Reflex

Shooting against the sun

West Line II

West Line I

My first photobook

Recovering a camera for lomography

I can't reproduce the story of this camera since I bought it at ebay. I don't even know how much it costed. I think it was cheap, I am always looking for bargains. For some reason I had to take the lens out and try to repair something. This something was, perhaps, related to the reload of the shutter. But I came to the conclusion that it was not possible for me to repair it and besides a small special spring that cares about the Iris diafragm to keep closed or opened was missing or felt down as I took the lens out. I still had it working with its lens but not always. Other features like light meter or range finder where also not working. The camera stood there until...

Travesti camera

...I bought at ebay a Vario shutter for an Adox Golf 63 camera. But looking the same it wasn't, the screws for the lenses were different. But, because of the same mechanical construction of the shutter I could use the spring to repair the old shutter on the Adox. For my surprise, the new shutter could work almost well, I say almost because the speed is only one, the fastest, or in B position. And this shutter served very well the Konika body lying around. I needed only a lens for the resulting focal lenght and I had a working camera. I looked in my box of lenses and I could find a very lomographic lens but giving more or less focused images at the center. And I decided to experiment...

Bar at the beach

Portuguese fishing boat

Sunset at the beach

Surfing waves

Like a desert

Empty beach

Bridge to the beach

Collecting shells

A view to the housing at beach

'Zoom effect' of the lens

Seaguls to the waves