I try to keep my photography simple, so I was intrigued by all the fuss over Caffenol developer recipes on the web. Normally I use resin coated enlarging paper not film but I figured it would work for paper too. And it does work, but naturally the coffee stains the negative and it smells really bad. So I started to try to find a substitute for the instant coffee.
Being a scientist at heart, I thought I’d start by leaving the coffee out. That means you just have a base solution of water, washing soda and vitamin C. Then I’d try different things to substitute for the phenols in the coffee and see what works best. To my surprise, the base solution worked really well all by itself.
Everything I tried that was supposed to have phenols in them didn’t make any real difference either. This led to more Googling and to find a guy named Roger Bunting and a post on https://www.shutterbug.com/content/c...istry-darkroom. Also, reading between the lines of some enlarging paper data sheets, I’ve concluded that they put some developing agent right in the emulsion of these papers.
So after conversing with Bunting and experimenting with different quantities of washing soda and vitamin C, I’ve come up with this basic recipe:
25g Arm and Hammer Washing Soda
8g Pure Vitamin C Crystals
250g Distilled Water
I thought I’d side by side compare this to Dektol. Maybe that isn’t the most state of the art developer in the world, but it is what I have and I assume represents real store bought chemistry. Here are two photos taken with identical conditions, developed for the exact same length of time, scanned and digitally processed at the same time. The results seem to be identical; Dektol on the left and Vitamin C on the right.
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