Topic: Betulinol-C?

[Jack Johnson]

Sick at home with fever, which may explain this post.

I was extremely pleased with my first outing with Caffenol-C, but I've already been wondering if I can replace the coffee with something even cheaper and obtainable locally. And by local I mean Alaska.

So, while making eggs in baskets for my kidlet this morning I was looking out the window and saw birch trees. Birch bark tea has betulic acid. Google tells me so does rosemary, and I've read that rosemary tea can be used as a weak developer, so I'm guessing we have potential for a similar reaction by replacing caffeic acid with betulic acid.

How's your chemistry? Likely positive result, or is it the fever talking?

[LT]

I've no idea, but there's only one way to find out!

Any oak trees near you? With galls? If so, you have a source of pyrogallic acid too ... got this from apug:

If so, you need to first fermant the oak galls and let them mold, and then extract them with water saturated ether and then carefully dry the extract. It's very flammable!

Heat the tannin extract with either strong acid or base to make gallic acid. Then you need to heat the gallic acid with 3 times its weight of water in an autoclave to make pyrogallic acid. (According to my Hawley's Condensed Chemical Dictionary.)

[Heather]

I tried once with a fairly strong fresh mint tea (boiled it for ages) but without vitamin C. Amazingly I got a VERY VERY faint image of a blown highlight (I was overexposing my test film too). It wasn't going to replace caffienol anyway...

[Jack Johnson]

Sadly, no oak trees. I grew up with them, though. There's no better tree for climbing.

Google tells me betulic/betulinic acid is a "pentacyclic triterpene" (so already I'm off in the deep end of the pool) and rosemary is plentiful in a half-dozen phenolic acids (including caffeic acid), so I think the birch bark tea may be a dead end. But I agree, no loss in experimentation.

[Jack Johnson]

I tried once with a fairly strong fresh mint tea (boiled it for ages) but without vitamin C. Amazingly I got a VERY VERY faint image of a blown highlight (I was overexposing my test film too). It wasn't going to replace caffienol anyway...

It might be worth trying again with vitamin C. I stumbled across this several days ago:

http://dommephoto.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/how-caffenol-works/

I don't know how accurate it is, but it seems reasonable, and I've also seen results like you're reporting done in coffee without the vitamin C. It also makes me wonder if all the _____-C developers are really just primarily ascorbic acid developers and we should be calling them Orange Java and Orange Mint. Or StarbucksTOL.

[Heather]

Previously I've been fine developing negatives in just coffee, water & sodium carbonate without any vitamin C. There's some chemical (Catchein or something? it's not caffeine but some other component of coffee) that develops the film, to my knowledge the biggest thing that the vitamin C does is keep the base from being dyed a dark brown.

[LT]

vitamin c (ascorbic acid) is a developer in its own right - Xtol and FX 39 (I think) use it. I think that adding Vit C to cafenol makes the two developing agents superadditive?   

[Francois]

Previously I've been fine developing negatives in just coffee, water & sodium carbonate without any vitamin C. There's some chemical (Catchein or something? it's not caffeine but some other component of coffee) that develops the film, to my knowledge the biggest thing that the vitamin C does is keep the base from being dyed a dark brown.

That's true, some people tried developing in concentrated no-doze tablets. And the result: nothing.
Caffeine is not the developer in itself, but I feel it still plays a role in the process.

The reaction of caffenol-C is not yet very well understood. I often feel it is more of a hardening/staining process than a standard silver conversion process...

[Jack Johnson]

More pseudorandom background info on homebrew ascorbic acid developer, from the infamous Patrick Gainer:

http://unblinkingeye.com/Articles/VitC/vitc.html

Envious of his particular, peculiar geekdom.

And, an interesting discussion regarding brewed vs instant coffee calculations, getting interesting about halfway down with Donald Qualls:

http://www.photography-forums.com/coffee-document-film-developer-t92028p3.html

It would be fun to throw cash at a chemistry grad student until there's a definitive answer about how the coffee chemistry works. Between Wikipedia and Google, it seems like just about any possible bastardization of Lipton's, oak tree, and washing soda in the right concentrations will net you a negative.

I suspect there are two species of insect that, when squished together in sufficient quantities, will net an adequate developer. And then, of course, someone will figure out if you make tea from Orange-Striped Oak Worms after they chrysalize you get PyroCat.

[Francois]

I wonder if Triptophane could make a developer
It also probably make your images mellow 

Now, where's my glass of milk...

[LT]

I wonder what kind of pictures would develop if you used lysergic acid? Daliesque?

[Jack Johnson]

I heard if you develop Pan F in lysergic acid you get Provia, but the results are inconsistent.

"To get back to the warning that I received. You may take it with however many grains of salt that you wish. That the Impossible Project Chocolate that is circulating around us isn't too good. It is suggested that you stay away from that. Of course it's your own trip. So be my guest, but please be advised that there is a warning on that one, ok?"

[Phil Bebbington]

"To get back to the warning that I received. You may take it with however many grains of salt that you wish. That the Impossible Project Chocolate that is circulating around us isn't too good. It is suggested that you stay away from that. Of course it's your own trip. So be my guest, but please be advised that there is a warning on that one, ok?"

Miller was using this on our walk and he was behaving rather odd

Leon, didn't he give you a print? I should check the backs of your hands for hair

I was very careful not to touch the stuff, it looked very dodgy.

[damiand]

Today i just develop 4x5 shanghai 100 in cafenol c-l :
40 g coffee/1l
16 g washing soda/1l
10 g vit c/1l
1g potassium bromide/1l

20 C  70 min. semi stand development ( agitation first 30 sec than 3 inversion in 2,4,8,18,30 min )

and my negatives are very thin almost no picture visible and what is surprise for me the base its no stain to brown colour at all. Before i was using coffenol with vit c but no potassium bromide and its always give me nice thick negative with brown colour.

i also develop 6 years expired ilford fp4 in the same soup after shanghai 55 minutes time and negative come out very thick with solid grey base i think its under develop ?

negatives are drying ill try contact print 4x5 and see what i may get but i think it will be quite hard to have good results with that thin negative . i will be using 15 watt light bulb   about 1,5 meter from negative and time i guess will be about 1 sec . no control at all

[jojonas~]

oh, we're talking about this stuff now? fun fun

I've just started adding salt to my caffenol-c and I find it mighty fun to follow the discussions on the flickr group http://www.flickr.com/groups/caffinol_private_palace/ "The new Caffenol Home" (a bit of a break out from the ordinary caffenol group, but that's neither here or there)

[damiand]

This is example of my coffenol c-l very thin negative image , very hard to scan and also corrected a lot in PS.

Could somebody explain me how its happend : negative in front of light showing negative image but on black showing positive. I have film ambrotype . How its possible ?

[Jack Johnson]

This is example of my coffenol c-l very thin negative image , very hard to scan and also corrected a lot in PS.

I've seen a lot of Caffenol C-L recipies and techniques, nearly all of them played out here:

http://caffenol.blogspot.com/search/label/Caffenol-C-L

I have to admit, C-L confuses me a bit. The general warning with C is that the developer gets noticeably weaker after about 30 minutes, and with C-L typically we're adding a restrainer and lengthening development time, so my brain says you should end up with this long tail where the developers are weakening at a geometric rate rather than a linear rate, yeah?

But, what's happening in the exposed areas? The developer has already done it's trick in the first few minutes, so other than softening the gelatin the long-but-weakening development might be bringing out the subtleties in the deeper tonal ranges, possibly softening the acutance just a bit? Not sure.

I would think if you're getting thin C-L negs it would come back to how much bromide and how much time. That same guy did stand development for 60 minutes with a 5-minute presoak and 1 g/l bromide in this post:

http://caffenol.blogspot.com/2010/08/caffenol-c-l-stand-development.html

...with nice results.

What I liked about using the C recipe I tried is that I wanted to gear my workflow towards box speed, standard development times, and locally-obtainable supplies, and it met that need for me. So far.

[Phil Bebbington]

The finer points of this thread are well off of my radar, but, Damiand, I love that shot!

[damiand]

Jack Johnson:

"..i did develop my b&w films for quite some time using highly diluted rodinal and stand development and was very happy with the results and especially also with the uncomplicated way of doing it: one developer for normal and push development, no tweaking for film type or room temperature. the only problem i got was uneven development, especially in medium format. as i was not able to solve this problem i looked around and at that time - about a year ago - i read about your stand- and semi-stand development experiences with caffenol and gave it a try. i wanted to try this strange idea of developing films anyway. i just followed your caffenol c-l recipe and it worked perfectly for me (prewash for 5min, agitating 30sec at the beginning and then 3 times at 2, 4, 10 and 40 minutes and dumping the develper at 70min). the results were amazing and had much of what i liked about the rodinal stand development. at some point i also wanted to be able to use the films not pushed at box-speed and tried to reduce the development time to get there. after some experiments i ended up with 5min prewash, 30sec agitation at the beginning and then 3 times at 1, 5 and 15 minutes and dumping the developer at 30min.


these two strategies for developing film at box speed or with a two stop push i'm using since and it always worked. and that at temperatures from 20-25 degrees celsius and films varying from acros (100+400), agfa apx 100 (100+400), kodak tri-x (400+1600), tmx (100+400), tmy (400+1600), ilford fp4+ (100+400) and some others (the numbers in brackets are the filmspeed i used the films at). the results were always very good. to see some images developed that way, you may have a look at my flickr stream ""..

i just find and totally confused it looks for box speed he developing only 30 min and when he pushed 2 stops 70 min .

everybody else writing about 70 min as starting point ?

so why my negatives are so thin thay should be overdevelop ( very dense ) ?

Phil Bebbington: Thank You;)

[LT]

somebody explain me how its happend : negative in front of light showing negative image but on black showing positive. I have film ambrotype . How its possible ?

we had a thread about that here a while ago - it's a common feature in thin negative - probably something to do with perception and the background light etc. 


I have no idea about why your negs would be so thin in coffee as I don't use the stuff, but One factor could be underexposure?

[Francois]

The only way to know for sure is to look at the markings.