Danie Keating regularly comes up with useful and very interesting ideas of alternative developers. Find him on flickr.
The formulas are as follows—assuming 300ml single reel 35mm tank:
Keating’s T42 Green Tea Phenol Developer
- 300ml tap water room temp
- 4ml 10% solution of sodium hydroxide (lye drain cleaner)
- 0.7g sodium bicarbonate (common baking soda)
- 0.5g ascorbic acid (vitamin C powder)
- 0.25g Green tea Phenol powder
Times will vary with film speed 20 mins to 1 hour semi stand
Keating’s Peppermint Twisted Developer
*Same 300ml assumption
- 300ml room temp tap water
- 2g Sodium Metasilicate (this is sold as TSP/90 wall wash for paint prep at hardware stores)
- 0.7g sodium bicarbonate
- 1g ascorbic acid
- 0.25g dried peppermint extract
40mins-1 hour stand—expect more grain with this formula on higher speed films. Use either formula soon after mixing.
Personally, I prefer the Green Tea version but you may want more grit for street photography. These small footprint formulas solve for the following:
- Less expensive than caffenol. 250G of green tea is $26 and 0.25g per roll means you can realize 1000 rolls at 2.6 cents per roll. Instant coffee is about 30 cents per roll for Caffenol.
- Less consumptive of total weight of chems—far smaller overall footprint or impact on what goes down the drain.
- No exposure to metol or sodium sulfite so contact dermatitis is avoided.
- Nothing has to come from a chemist.
- Image quality looks quite good to me
Another post from Daniel:
same negative Smena MZ3, the whimpy washed out scan was fixed in Kodak Rapid fix. The higher density one was achieved by re-fixing it in Arista non-hardening fixer. These are both raw scans of the same negs from same scanner. Easily a 1.5 stop boost
His pic shows the difference. Interesting.
