Only Her Photoprocessor Knows For Sure

More news and musings from this corner of the typosphere:

• Have you written your entry for Silent Type 2: Revenge of the Nerds yet? No? Egads, what are you waiting for? The deadline is three weeks from today. Send one in so you can bask in the awfulness of my poetical waxing. Go on.
• Typewriters in the news have been pretty quiet as of late, except for their use as a marker of time passing ("Joe Blow started when the city desk was a typewriter and a broken mimeograph...") A few are worth passing along, though, including the obligatory piece on a typewriter repair business that's still in business, an art show in the Twin Cities about the life of secretaries, and a meditation on the value of typed work then versus now. I'll spare Olivander's modesty by not linking to his writeup (with photos!) in his local paper, but he gets a little dig in at keychoppers there, so Viva Los Retronauts!
  
• My own adventures in camera restoration continue: the big Wollensak shutter I talked about here is humming along, as much as a seventy-plus year old shutter can hum. All the faster speeds are responsive, though I don't have a means to measure them. They sound fast, and given the latitude of modern films, it's likely fast enough. The challenge now is to make a measurement of the focal length of the lens -- the distance from the center of the lens to where the film would sit -- and then rig up something the same size out of cardboard. Sounds like a lot of work, but still simpler than what I had planned.
• Still de-gooping the shutter mechanism of this camera, too. Works great when the shutter is bathed in alcohol, not so much when it dries out and the old oils redistribute. Kindly light a candle for us, won't you?
• Also on the film front, I've tried coffee as a film developing agent for black-and-white processing, but now I'm reading about using hair dye for color processing. The process is slow, and doesn't sound as fussy as using a C-41 kit. In fact, it sounds like the opposite of fussy. I do have a copy of the Darkroom Cookbook at home which the thread author cites, so obviously I need to dig it out and do some reading. Can I say again: how cool is it that a trip to the grocery store could supply you with almost complete film-development chemistry? Answer: very cool. *
  
• Kind of quiet out there in the typosphere, what's happening with everyone?

* Update: Cancel that "almost." A quick scan of the Intertubes shows that hypo (the classic name for fixer) is also self-mixable, as long as you are handy to a place that sells pool chemicals. As there's a pool supply store about three blocks from my house, I'd say that's a yes. Chlorine-reducing chemicals reportedly work for this very situation. I reiterate: very cool.

New From Clickthing Industries: The Handoscan (Mark 1)

I'm getting closer: my hand-scanning technique just got an upgrade with the lunchtime creation of the Handoscan (Mark 1), aka, a homemade light-table. I've been using my digital camera to "scan" the negatives I've been making, since I don't have a film scanner or ready access to one that can handle transparencies. For just posting pictures on the web, my camera's resolution is Plenty Good Enough, but taking a picture of a highly reflective surface held up to a bright light is what you might call a challenge. Inspiration struck when I took a quick inventory of the clutter useful materials I have around my office.

Behold!


Cardboard box, tape, old flexible cutting board, binder clips.


White plastic acts as diffuser, spreading the daylight evenly.

And a couple of shots that I was unable to get before, due to the horrible reflections from the camera:



I'm still shooting through the plastic negative sleeves, and the sleeve is not being held perfectly flat yet -- I tried some magnets from the crafts store as a means to "pin" it down, but they're too weak to pass though the layers of cardboard. I'll see if I can locate some stronger magnets and try doing a negative strip held directly onto the white plastic.

Update:

I've got a lead on some dead hard-drive magnets, thanks for the tip, Olivander. Also, a couple more pics to enjoy...


From the Olympus Pen


From the Nishika N8000

Argust Memories

Another Argus Day come and gone. Here's some preliminary "scans" from the roll I took yesterday, and developed last night in Caffenol C. I've simply got to buckle down and get a decent scanner if I'm going to post pictures: these look like they've been shot though a fine mixture of Vaseline and sand. The excess dust on the guitar picture is particularly annoying.

My "handoscan" technique is holding up a sandwich of white plastic, the negative sleeves, and a sheet of clear Plexiglas to the window and then photographing it in macro mode with my digital camera. (In other words: pathetic.) Reflections from the digital camera bounce back onto the Plexiglas and sleeves, so many of the shots have a mysterious ring on them. What I need to do is encase the setup in a box of some kind to limit stray reflections. I'm still experimenting.

Strange Brew

Hey, it worked!

Not that I should be too surprised. Despite the unlikely-sounding recipe, the chemistry is founded on some solid science, published in a few places besides the interwebs. But still, seeing is believing, as they say. And now I'm sure you're burdened with questions, which I will attempt to address:

Q: What am I looking at here?

A bunch of firsts. I recently bought a 100-foot roll of inexpensive black-and-white 35mm film from Freestyle photo and wound it onto recycled cartridges from Walgreens, using a bulk film loader from the thrift store. First time I'd ever used a bulk loader, or handled that much film in one go. I just finished shooting my first homemade roll of the stuff today.

In the true retro-tech DIY spirit, I also made a batch of Caffenol C developer out of mostly-common household ingredients, and following the spotty and conflicting directions on the Internet, developed this roll tonight.

Q: Caffe-whatnow?

"Caffenol," a jokey name for this particular blend. Recipes are varied, and some call for the addition of vitamin C -- hence Caffenol C --to speed up the development process and give clearer negatives. My Super-Sekrit Recipe (don't tell!) is:

For one roll of 35mm film:

• 1 round teaspoon of vitamin C powder (acetic acid, from the health food store)
  
• 2 round teaspoons of washing soda (a.k.a. soda ash, or sodium carbonate) This is not baking soda.
  
• 4 round teaspoons of the cheapest instant coffee available (regular, not decaf)
• 8 oz. of water at 68 degrees F/20 degrees C

1. Mix coffee with about half of the water in a container.
   
2. Mix vitamin C and soda ash with remaining water in another container. Caution: this becomes fizzy
3. Stir both until all powder/coffee is totally mixed into the water
4. Combine both mixtures and let stand 10-15 minutes for "micro-bubbles" to settle
5. Develop 12 minutes, agitating twice per minute for about ten seconds per cycle. Without the vitamin C this step reportedly takes 20-30 minutes, and the negatives come out a tad foggy.
   
6. Use a water stop bath, um, until the water is clear? Didn't time this step.
7. Use commercial film fixer for recommended time (I did 3 min.)
8. Wash in water, add drop of Jet Dry and hang in shower to dry overnight (see above pic)

Q: While you were talking, I Google'd Caffenol. I hear that it smells bad. Really?

You really need to experience it for yourself. My initial reaction was "Ugh. Oh God. Ugh." It smells so reasonable before it's all mixed together.

I think it smells like coffee and old grease. My son said it smelled like "liquid [explicative]" right before he was sent to his room. It's bad, but not clear-the-house bad. Next time, I'm going to mix it up before I roll my film onto the spools, so I'm not in the same room during its 10-15 minute "breathing time." Phew.

Q: What's the science behind this?

Something about the caffeic acid in the coffee being the developing agent, which is in a higher ratio in instant coffee, due to the cheaper beans used and the roasting process. The soda ash helps goose it along, and the vitamin C boosts it a bit more. Keebler-elf magic and chicken entrails, as far as I'm concerned. But it works. Those negatives look great, certainly on par with the stuff I developed years ago in D-76, or whatever it was we used in class.

Q: Speaking of D-76, why not just buy commercial developer? It's faster, more consistent, and cheaper.

Oh, come on. I use typewriters and fountain pens. Why do anything easy? Besides, it's insanely cool, not just unrolling the film from the spool, but knowing that every part of that process was controlled by me.

Just try it.

Q: What's next?

Once the negatives are dry, I'll put them into some sleeves and see if I can rig up a digital-camera-scanner setup. There's a cereal box near me right now that might make a great daylight lightbox. Stay tuned, coffee achievers.

UPDATE: A few results...

click to embiggen

All softness in these edges of these images is due to my terrible "handoscan" technique (aka, negatives up against the window). I'm amazed how good these look. As a whole, they're a bit dense, but I think that's due to operator error, not the developing process.