News 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.

Merry Christmas

Wed, 24 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I wish you and your families a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. See you in 2015!

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.

Merry Christmas

Tue, 24 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I wish all of you and your families a Merry, Merry Christmas!

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.

Happy New Year 2013

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

All the best for the next year!

Any New Year Resolution?
I can give you some tips:

Shoot more Film!
Develop in caffenol!
Share the Love!

Sincerly,

Dirk

Merry Christmas!

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I wish you and your families a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Next year we will of course continue ‘A Coffee with’ and I have some new films to test out. Let’s see what 2013 brings.

Enjoy the calm time of the year!

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.

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:

Organizing your caffenol scans in Lightroom®

Thu, 24 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

2 weeks ago I did a bit of spring cleaning in my Lightroom® catalog and thought about how I could properly tag all my scans. I don’t mean keywords, but proper EXIF tags to see Camera Model, Lens and all that stuff in my EXIF Panel in Lightroom® so I can search them through the Metadata Library Filter.

So I found ExifTool, a command-line utility which allows to read, write and create EXIF tags in all sorts of files. A few shell scripts later I was still not satisfied, because of course my files are all spread over in my filesystem, so changing EXIF tags in files over different folders would mean exporting and reimporting pictures.

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.

We are still here!

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

just a quick post to tell everyone of our readers that we are still alive and keep experimenting with caffenol in all variants. I recently got an email about developing glas negatives in caffenol, so interesting times are coming. For the moment I will leave you with a picture one of our readers sent me. Maybe you want to guess what it is and how the picture was made.

Merry Christmas!

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I would like to wish everyone of you a Merry, Merry Christmas. Thanks for all the comments, lovely pictures and ideas that you sent me in the last year. I hope I will have some more time next year to fill this blog with new recipes and experiments around caffenol.

See you next year,
Dirk

Kodak Portra 100T

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

While sorting out my Camera Cabinet I found a Roll of exposed Kodak Portra 100T (Tungsten). This film is not available new anymore, used prices of expired film go from 6 to 20 EUROs.

I had no clue when, what and with which camera I shot it. That’s one of the things I like with analog film: You never really know what you get until you develop the roll. I developed it in Delta-STD for 14 minutes and it came out quite nicely, but most of the pictures where badly composed, under or overexposed, so I can only show 3 examples. From seeing the pictures I could identify the camera: My lovely Russian Rangefinder Zorki 4. I had no Lightmeter at the time, so exposure was off on most shots. Auto Levels in Photoshop gives a nice brownish toning, but that doesn’t work on all pictures, so I converted one of them to ‘real’ B&W.

Caffenol for paper prints

Tue, 24 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a long time since there was an article here on caffenol.org and I know that some of you are really looking forward to see more pictures of prints developed in Caffenol. I have received very nice results from József, a Hungarian mechanical engineer, coffee addict and lover of analogue b&w photography and good wines.

József writes:

Caffenol came to my life as a crazy idea. Some months ago I found a short description of Caffenol in a Hungarian photography forum. It was enough to wake up the curiosity in me so I began to search for additional info about it. Then I decided to try… The first attempt was an expired (and forgot in the camera) Fuji Superia 400 colour negative. It worked, I had very promising result so I knew that I must go on with this coffee soup. But I found the paper development more exciting.

1 year caffenol.org – a flashback

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Back in October 2009 I read some crazy stuff about developing expired color film in Coffee and Washing Soda, and was blown away about the results you could get with cheap instant coffee and cheap washing soda. So I thought I’ll give it a try. During Summer I was hunting for old cameras on several flea markets and already had done some shootings with them, but giving the films to the lab and letting them scan them. After I read about this ‘caffenol’ thing, I bought a daylight Developing Tank from ebay, an Agfa Rondinax 35, some coffee and some soda. I loaded some Fujicolor 1600 into my Zorki 4and walked around through my flat. I don’t remember exactly which recipe I used and had no idea if it would work at all. This is one of the first pictures I ever did in caffenol:

The Delta Recipe Goes Standard.

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

We have received several comments, that teaspoon measuring is not the preferred way in mixing up your caffenol brew, as it is very inaccurate and ‘1 teaspoon’ can mean from 1 to 5 grams, depending how big your teaspoon is.

Reinhold from caffenol.blogspot.com has developed some very good base recipes, using only litres and grams, and especially his chart at http://caffenol.blogspot.com/2010/08/recipes.html can be extremely useful, I just find it irritating that coffee is not on top of the list of ingredients 🙂

Matchbox Pinhole & Caffenol

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Caffenol Reader and Lomography member Hana (http://www.lomography.com/homes/hilarion) sent us her results of a matchbox pinhole camera. Instructions how to build one can be found at http://www.matchboxpinhole.com.

Hanas Matchboxpinhole camera

Hana is from Slovakia and uses vitamin c from DM drogeri, an unknown coffee brand and “kalcinovaná sóda na pranie”, a local soda product.

Below is a selection of her pinhole photos, all wonderful examples how beautiful pinhole photography can be:

Happy New Year!

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a busy year for caffenol, and 2011 will not calm down, that’s for sure.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your support, your comments and critics about this blog. I wish you and your families a very happy year 2011.

I didn’t take any fireworks pictures this year, but hope a fire engine is close enough 🙂 Film used here is Rollei RPX 400, developed for 11min. in Caffenol Delta-STD. What Delta-STD exactly is, will follow…

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.

Film, etc.

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

www.filmetc.org

Today, I proudly present a blog of a friend of mine who calls himself “a Linux sysadmin at day and photographer at night (and vice-versa).”

The address is www.filmetc.org

He is indeed a very talented photographer and if Mathias does something, he does it right. His blog is all about processing film inside and outside the darkroom and he has just started it, so you can start reading without much backlog. He will keep you updated soon, so the cold winter days will not get too boring while you are scanning all your pictures from windy fall.

Action!

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I cleaned up my camera cabinet yesterday and stumbled upon my Action sampler camera where I remembered I shot some film with already. My Action sampler is a no name model, but is better than the one from Lomography in so many ways: It has a proper viewfinder, it is not as ugly and it was only 2 EUROS, new. Not in a nice box as from Lomography, but hey it’s not the boxing that takes pictures.

Scan VS print

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, the title of this post looks confusing, because of course scanning is an input process and printing is an output process. Ad it’s even more confusing, as the print needs to be scanned as well… But first things first.

My last development of ISO 3200 Film was quite successful and I was quite surprised by the results. The negatives didn’t look as good as HP5 or TMAX but I thought those could be actually ‘thick’ enough to be enlarged onto paper.

Density

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

If you read a bit about caffenol development or development in general, you will quickly learn phrases like “my negatives came out very dense” or “negatives where thin, but scanned fine”. So what does all that mean?

If you develop color films in caffenol, most likely you will get dense negatives (dense meaning you cannot see through the film in this case), positive films and High ISO films will be denser then low ISO films. These negatives are not very good to produce prints on paper, as contrast is quite low and they have an orange mask. High ISO B&W Films will most likely come out very thin and will look like underdeveloped negatives. Both types will scan fine and with a small amount of Post Processing (Level adjustments) they will look good on a screen.

Caffeafine (Using Caffenol-C as 2 step developer)

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A friend of mine recently told me about Diafine, a quite famous dual solution developer that is said to push mid tones by 1 stop. Diafine is a compensating developer, meaning you put in Solution A, let the film rest for 4 minutes with maybe 1 slow agitation per minute, pour out Solution A (both solutions can be reused) and then put in Solution B and let it develop further 4 minutes with agitation that is specific to the used film.

ORWO PAN 100

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Recently someone gave me two rolls of ORWO PAN 100, a panchromatic Black and White film, made here in Germany. ORWO still sells it as medium speed surveillance film, but I don’t know if the emulsion nowadays is the same as the one from the film that I’ve got. This panchromatic film has the characteristic to be sensitive to all wavelengths of visible light, producing a very realistic image.

Both Rolls are expired long ago (1996) and so I was not really expecting good results as I didn’t know how the FIlm has been stored over the years. I loaded it into my [Revue 35CC (my Espresso Camera)](/espresso-camera/ “Espresso Camera” and began shooting from EI 100 to 800. Results are quite usable, but I find the grain not so appealing. Contrast wise this film behaves quite good, so I might consider buying a few fresh rolls to see if the grain is the result from the expired emulsion. Nevertheless this Film can now be found in the [Film Development Chart](/film-development-chart/ “Film Development Chart”,

ISO 50

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

When I started analogue photography, I wanted to shoot on grainy high speed films primarily, preferable at night. So far I have not managed to do a grainy night shooting, but did buy a lot of different films just to see, how they look in caffenol. So this week I tried Ilford Pan F 50, a panchromatic ISO 50 film. And as I currently have an Olympus OM4-Ti, it was just perfect to try out the spot metering features of it.

The Espresso Camera

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Small, black, fast. This is how you can describe the Revue 35CC. The camera was also sold as Chinon Bellami and has a very unique opening mechanism using the advance lever. Some people call it a ‘barn door’ camera, as the lever opens two doors and extends the Lens.

Features are minimalistic: 35mm f2.8 Lens, Program AE, Scale Focus.
A dedicated (automatic) Flash can be added to the camera, which makes the camera perfect as pocketable party cam.

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.

Goodbye Leica

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I had a Leica M6 for loan for quite some time, but gave it back recently. What can I say about this camera? It’s beautiful, gorgeous and so unobtrusive at the same time. Paired wit the 35mm f2 this is an ideal street shooter. Here are the last shots I took with the M6. All on Kodak Porta 160 NC, developed in Caffenol-C. This film looks stunning in Caffenol. If you are in the need for a low speed film with some very nice film grain, you really should consider this type, even if it is a color film.

Stars galore!

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

So we finally found a day, where there are clear skies and packed our car with some Equipment. As Wolfgang bought a new 200mm Newton Telescope, we didn’t take too much Photography Equipment as we would be really busy enjoying the view of Saturn through a 8mm Ocular. But I left the shutter open for 4 hours on my Zorki 4. I think I can be proud of a shot of startrails, that is not boring 🙂 Ilford HP5 Plus Developed in Caffenol-C+ (3x Vitamin-C to decrease grain).

Stir until smooth!

Thu, 20 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Because of the really bad weather, we had no chance to do our [caffenol astroshooting](/2010/05/05/caffenol-goes-astrophotography/. So instead of going shooting, we mixed up some developer and spent the last days with developing and scanning film. So hold on, we will post some more stuff soon.