Featured on caffenol.org

Welcome Tina Bele – Piller Cuveeol recipe

Sun, 11 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Hello readers, I know it was pretty quiet last year here on the blog. It’s not that I had no new ideas or stuff to write about, but just very little time. This year I will hopefully have more time, as I have some pretty new stuff in the pipeline.

Technical Pan in Caffenol-SMT / Mini Workshop

Fri, 07 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I recently asked in the Caffenol Facebook group how I should shoot a roll of Kodak Technical Pan. Many people suggested I should shoot it at EI 25 or 50, but I also wanted to know if it is possible to get something useful out of it in EI 200. I took a stroll around a small lake near my workplace and fired away.

When the roll was exposed, I wanted to do something crazy, so I asked again on Facebook in which recipe it should be developed. After 9 suggestions and some calculations by averaging ingredients and times, I had my recipe. For the moment it is called Caffenol-SMT (Caffenol-SoMeThing).

A Coffee with…No. 7 – Becky Ramotowski

Tue, 04 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

After a long, long (too long) break, we continue with our Series “A Coffee with…” where we present analog enthusiasts and their work. Today I am happy to talk with Becky Ramotowski, who has a real passion about pinhole cameras and ‘marinating’ prints in caffenol. Becky also wrote an awesome book about the “Secrets of Stargazing”. If you are interested in Astronomy, I can highly recommend this book! Surprisingly, Becky doesn’t drink coffee but enjoys a good glass of red wine, tea or mountain water… (Which all of makes nice caffeic acid based developer) Becky is also a group admin in our beautiful Caffenol Facebook Group, so if you are a Facebook member, go ahead and join our group.

LeiCaffenol – Caffenol Workshop in the Leica Gallery Salzburg

Fri, 28 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Mark your calendars! I will teach a 2 days caffenol workshop from 31.08-01.09.2013 together with Marco Spalluto at the Leica Gallery Salzburg.

This 2 days workshop is suited for absolute beginners in film developing as well as for experienced users that already develop their films at home. No experience in film developing is needed for this workshop.

The only equipment needed is an analog 35mm camera and film. We have a small amount of loan cameras available.

A Coffee with…No. 6 – Gabriel Van Ingen

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today our journey takes us to Nottingham in the UK and we meet up with Gabriel Van Ingen, a photographer that has mostly given up digital. Read on, and look what he has to say.

Caffenol: Hi Gabriel, good to have you here on the caffenol blog. Could you please introduce yourself.

Gabriel: Hi Dirk, I am a photography lecturer and professional photographer based in Nottingham in the Uk. I work and live at Clear View House where I have a professional darkroom and photographic studio.

A Coffee with…No. 5 – Urban Hafner

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today we are in Grenoble, France to share some Espressos (You get an Espresso if you order “un café”) with a professional programmer. Read on, what Urban has to say about the analog world.

Caffenol: Hi Urban, I hope you had a lovely Christmas and lots of presents. Can you please introduce yourself.

Urban: My name is Urban Hafner. I’m a web developer from Germany. I currently live in France with my lovely wife and our two year old daughter.

Fighting Dust

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Today I am declaring war. I can see, that I got your attention! What am I declaring war on? DUST!

I know that there are plenty of ways to remove dust from negatives in post, but the best way of course is to properly dry your negatives in a (nearly) dust-free room.

Top Tip here: hang your washed film in the bathroom and before you hang the film, turn on the shower with hot water for 1-2 minutes till you have a foggy bathroom, hang your film, and close the door. If you washed your film good enough, your negatives should come out pretty dust-free. And for all the remaining dust spots, or if you have scratched your film, lean back and watch my brandnew video on how to remove dust from a scanned negative, using Adobe Photoshop Elements 11.

The Caffenol Cookbook & Bible

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The Caffenol Cookbook & Bible is a project by large format photographer Bo Sibbern-Larsen who got eight other photographers together to write a book about caffenol. It’s a free book, available for download:

Download The Caffenol Cookbook & Bible – Recipes and Tutorials

The book is under constant development, so you will find quite some things that change from time to time – visit to visit. This is all done in our effort to serve you the finest and latest cutting edge Caffenol recipes from around the globe.

A Coffee with…No. 4 – Christian Walch

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Today I share an Interview with a colleague of mine that works with me on the dark side of IT. (Windows) I am guilty of infecting him with the caffenol virus and to buy himself into the Pentax and Micro Four Thirds system 🙂 He is also a Hair Model.

Caffenol: Good Morning, Chris! Grab yourself some tea and: please introduce yourself.

Chris: Hi Dirk, it’s me, your colleague Chris. I’m raised and born in Munich and always looking for the opinion to do things differently.

A Coffee with…No. 3 – Şan Güneş

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

We are trying to get around the World, so this time I had a virtual coffee with Şan Güneş from Turkey. Şan is a some random computer engineering student, free software enthusiast and also happens to do some caffenol development. He also states that the Kebab that you can he here in Germany is different, but way better then the one in Turkey.

Caffenol: Hey Şan, I made some fresh turkish coffee with plenty of sugar. While I boil it a third time, please introduce yourself.

A Coffee with…No. 2 – Kiril Miloshev

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Today I have special guest here, It’s Kiril Miloshev from Sophia, Bulgary. He is a very nice chap and a group administrator of the caffenol Facebook group. He uses a good mixture of a Leica Rangefinder, a Nikon DSLR and a Nikon J1 Mirrorless camera. And I guess his office has the lovely smell of that caffenol developer floating around.

Can we start? Sure we can!

Caffenol: Hi Kiril, nice to have you here on the site. Please introduce yourself.

A Coffee with…No. 1 – Dagie Brundert

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A Coffee with Dagie Brundert

I am very, very excited to have my first coffee with Dagie Brundert, one of the few persons that attended an invisible baseball game. Dagies mission is to find beauty in simple things. oh and she does motion picture film!

Caffenol: Hi there, please introduce yourself.

Dagie: Hello, my name is Dagie Brundert, I’m a super 8 short film maker, I’ve been making films for more than 20 years and I’m very much in love with hand processing! I live in Berlin, Germany.

A Coffee with… Dirk Essl

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Hi Caffenol-Lovers,

There is a new series coming up on caffenol.org, called “A Coffee with…” Where you play the main part.

It is an interview type of series, where I will be asking some questions about you, your gear and other stuff.

I have announced it already on the caffenol facebook group and got quite some feedback already. I think it is a great way to get to know other photographers and read about other’s techniques and ideas. I will also use it to produce a database where to buy ingredients for successful caffenol development, as this varies from country to country. So you can give something back to the community. You can include your work, pictures of your gear, pictures of yourself, pictures of your darkroom or pictures of your favourite coffee cup. Everybody is keen on learning something about other caffenol-addicts. And hey, everyone is invited to have a coffee with me.

Coffee in motion

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Developing 35mm film in caffenol works. No doubt. There are very little films that do not develop in caffenol. If you stay away from these and mostly scan your pictures, you will be fine. With any caffenol-recipe that you can find on the internet you will in the end see a picture on the negative. It might be foggy, dense, underdeveloped, but seeing something that works and something that you made yourself is always amazing. Film is not dead!

Wineol – Red Wine developer

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Niklas Rühl posted a picture in our Facebook Group of a negative developed in Wineol, an alternate devolper that is made out of Red Wine, Washing Soda and Vitamin C. The whole process and some really nice pictures can be seen on his website. The site is in German,so here is a google translation. I knew already that it is possible to mix up other developers which are based on Washing Soda and Vitamin C, but never really had the interest to try it. But as I did some enlargements recently, why don’t try it as a paper developer. That said I took the cheapest Red Wine I have and mixed up some developer. As I always use plenty of Vitamin C in my recipes, I used the following formula:

Fomapan 400 in Caffenol-STD – Experiments and Results. And Large Format

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is an article of fine art figure photographer Scott Nichol from Allentown, PA, USA. You can visit his blog at http://www.silverystars.com/somanystars/. The Original article can be found here.

I wanted to experiment with the recipe for a coffee-based film developer commonly called Caffenol. Dirk Essl at caffenol.org does an excellent job of keeping track of development times for lots of different films that can be developed with Caffenol. However, most of the films that have been developed using this unique developer were films like Ilford HP5+ and Delta 400, neither of which I had any 4×5 stock at the moment. I did, however, have a good supply of Fomapan 400 and seeing as how development times for Fomapan and the Ilford films were similar, I decided to have a go at it. Initially, I decided just to follow the recommendation for Ilford Delta 400 of 9 minutes at 68°F.

Caffenol as paper developer

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Caffenol-C in all variants makes a wonderful developer for negative film and if used carefully, it can be used for nearly any film speed and a lot of different films. So far I have found one (1) film, that fails in Caffenol: Rollei Retro 400. But this might have been just my fault, so I have just bought a few rolls of this film to make further experiments.

There are not so many examples about using caffenol as a per developer, so I had to try it. Mainly because I had no print developer to hand when my darkroom was built. And as I had no film to develop and I was sorting my negatives, I thought I give it a try.

caffenomatography

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

If you are new to film developing, or just new to caffenol developing you can find plenty of ressources on the internet and read your way through. But sometimes it’s nice to lean back and watch something beautiful, and while watching it, learn from it. When I started with caffenol, I watched a whole lot of videos about developing, discovering different techniques. There are a lot of videos, this I can tell. And I can tell you, that this one is the most beautiful video about developing film in caffenol. Punkt.

Smena Symbol – The other LOMO

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I just love going on a flea market and buying any camera that the owner is willing to give away for under 5 EURO. Just like this wonderful Smena Symbol. A plastic camera from Russia, made in the LOMO factory. It features a 40mm f4 lens and weather symbols as additional shutter speed scale. The lens has a stepless aperture, which doubles as ISO setting. You can read more about this camera on Camerapdia.

Caffenol goes Astrophotography

Wed, 05 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

There is not so much happening here at the moment, because I have bought too many cameras in the last weeks and need to finish all the films.

But I am quite excited about one event that will take place next week. We will head towards Sudelfeld and shoot at about 1700 meters height. And will shoot the stars. Mostly digital Cameras will be used, but I will take some analog equipment with me to shoot star trails throough the whole night. And to add some crazyness, I will of course then develop the whole lot of films in caffenol.

Hold on. Color film?

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Well, you can develop every kind of film in Caffenol (a B&W process, that is) as long as it contains silver. So why not push that to the extreme and use an expired ISO 1600 Film and develop it in Caffenol.

Salt & Pepper

Voigtlaender Vitoret DR f2.8 1/30s.

Fujicolor 1600, expired 2004
Developped in caffenol (No-C) for 30 minutes.

The negative comes out very dense, but as I primarily scan the negatives, this is not a problem.