I’ve been looking for alternatives to off the shelf developer solutions for film. I started my home development journey using Cinestill DF96 monobath, and I can foresee that disposal of the developer will be a pain, so I started researching alternatives.
Caffenol seems to be a viable and well researched alternative however in the quantities required even cheap coffee is expensive, and I read a lot of complaints about the smell (Tuna?!) And the coffee stains the film negatives.
Researching Caffenol mostly at Reinhold’s excellent caffenol.org site and various other sites indicated that the active ingredient of the coffee in caffenol is not Caffeine, but Caffeic Acid, a polyphenol compound.
So, I thought, what other sources of polyphenol are there? I found a great list of different substances and their polyphenol content here: Food sources of polyphenols. Top of the list is cloves with 51,188mg per 100g, 71 times the polyphenol content by weight of coffee at 214mg per 100g. So simple vague maths leads to a clove quantity of under a gram for the recipe compared to 50+g of coffee.
There are several Caffenol recipes out there and for my first attempt I got a little mixed up and calculated my recipe OK, but used a recipe for stand development which should be developed for about 70 minutes. My intention was to develop for a much shorter time than this, so at my planned 25 minutes of course the negative came out woefully underdeveloped.
Ingredients:
- 1 x 500mg clove supplement tablet
- 12g Sodium Carbonate (Soda Ash)
- 10g Vitamin C powder
- 500ml tap water
Method:
- In a 500ml jug, dissolve the clove tablet in 200ml water at 48°C. Stir for 20 seconds and leave to stand.
- In a second, 1 litre jug, add the Sodium carbonate to 300ml water at room temperature, stir until the mixture is nearly clear.
- Add the Vitamin C powder to the Sodium Carbonate solution, and stir until the mixture is nearly clear. The solution will fizz a little but nothing alarming.
- Carefully pour the clove solution into the Sodium Carbonate. Try to avoid transferring the sediment.
- Leave the solution to stand.
Development
I developed this ISO100 film in the ars imago lab box. 30 seconds initial agitation, then 10 seconds every minute for 25 minutes.
Stop bath
I agitated in 500ml tap water for 1 minute.
Fixing
Fixing was using Ilford Rapid fixer diluted 1:4 with tap water. Agitated for 30 seconds then 10 seconds per minute for 5 minutes. This is the first time I’ve used this so not 100% sure this is the right approach. Once I have the developer working I want to look at alternative fixers and ways of reclaiming the silver from the fixing solution to make disposal simpler. That will be a later project.
Wash
I agitated for 1 minute in tap water at room temperature then flushed for 1 minute in room temperature tap water. Repeat x 10. Then hang to dry for 1.5 hours.
Results
Ingredient specifics
I’m listing here the specific ingredients I used here should anyone want to replicate the experiments.
G&G Vitamins clove supplement Clove supplements
Jacquard Soda Ash Soda Ash
Clovenol 