The Delta Recipe Goes Standard.

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 Read more…

Matchbox Pinhole & Caffenol

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. 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 Read more…

Density testprint

Density

f 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)

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.

I was amazed about the tonality that the developer brings, and because I like experimenting, I thought why not try out something like that with Caffenol. Of course I knew that it will most probably not push the mids, and I cannot reuse the Caffenol mix, but it was fun for the experiment.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.

I was amazed about the tonality that the developer brings, and because I like experimenting, I thought why not try out something like that with Caffenol. Of course I knew that it will most probably not push the mids, and I cannot reuse the Caffenol mix, but it was fun for the experiment.