I developed & fixed film using nothing but edible ingredients from a grocery store. It’s been over twelve months, and it’s time to re-scan to see how the picture holds up.
Developing black and white film with coffee is a well-known trick. Many photographers tried this method and its edible variations. However, the last step usually involves industrial chemicals.
The Caffenol film development experiment I tried last year used an unproven substitute for the last step (fixer): table salt. It got results, but I wasn’t sure if the film would fade over time.
Something reminded me of this experiment today, and I decided to scan the film again to see how well it held up.
Turns out it held up well. I see no significant difference between today’s scan (attached) and the results I got in December 2022 (see the article ☝️).
The salt fixer works!
My fixer recipe used 300g of iodized salt with 1L water (or as much as could dissolve). After some agitation, the film was soaked in salt overnight.
I can confirm this works, but could this recipe be altered to be more practical? Would an hour or even less time in salt still work?
I have been meaning to respond to your original post. I was saddened to see how badly your negatives came out, and even more sad to see that you believed and others “confirmed” that this is normal! It is not! Proper Caffenol recipes produce negatives of the HIGHEST quality, indistinguishable from negatives developed in Kodak D76 or similar. Not grainy, not dark and murky. Clear, fine grain, great tonality and contrast. It makes me cringe to see all the people online saying you get poor quality negatives from Caffenol. I have been shooting since the 1990s on dozens of film stocks and with dozens of developers. I have been using nothing but Caffenol for the last few years since I realized its advantages. The only drawback is development time is a bit longer than commercial developers.
I understand. Could you tell me what may’ve gone wrong and have you developed this exact film using the recipe? The results were confirmed for P3200 specifically, I’ve certainly seen better results with slower emulsions.
