Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Semicolor

Like I promised in the last post, I exposed a cheap color film with a new recharged disposable camera, an Agfa Le Box with a 35 mm roll 24 exp. made in Japan for Schleker, Germany. I used a process based on Dignan's 2-bath developing method but where the first bath is just CD-4 (11g/l) and Sodium Sulfite (9g/l), 10 minutes at room temperature. Then I used as second bath a 'caffenol' with 40g/l soda and 20g/l cheap soluble coffee from LIDL supermarkts, 15 minutes at room temperature. To bleach the film I used povidone iodine 10% (Betadyne), 1 hour at room temperature and finally the fixer was just common table salt (300g/l), more than 5 hours at 30ºC. To mantain the temperature of the salt bath at about 30ºC, I putted a bulb lamp in a cookies box and the developer tank on the box. The film is not totally fixed, but already transparent and scannable, I will fix it later on leting it on a salt solution for some hours more.

But in this experiment, except CD-4, all other chemicals are available for other uses. Let us see: sodium sulfite is the same used for swimming pools as chlorine neutralizer; potash or sodium carbonate is available at drugstores as cleaning agent; coffee at supermarkets; Betadyne at a Pharmacy and salt at supermarkets too. The only thing special you need to develop C-41 the way I did, is CD-4, the rest is easy to get. Another point, the ammount of coffee will determine the color you get, fewer coffee leads to more color and no coffee at all you get these very bright colors of Dignan's method tending to magenta.

Now, some photos f the Agfa Le Box:



Man and nature


Corn field

River Lena from the pedestrian bridge

Water of the river Lena




The house behind the road

Aerial trafo station

While walking

The last pic

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