There's a bunch of weird stuff on my desk and that's because today we're gonna develop some photographs with coffee
Let me give you the backstory about how we got here
I recently got into old school film photography
I wanted a hobby that was slow that was difficult
That had no instant gratification that had gratification that you really had to work for when I told the Internet this
The Internet very excitedly said you have to do a video on caffenol
what is caffenol?
Caffenol is a developing mixture a concoction of chemicals that you use to bring the image out of photographic film
Its history goes back to 1995. It was invented basically by
Dr Scott Williams in his class at the Rochester Institute of Technology. It's popular today because it's a really cheap alternative to traditional
darkroom chemicals
It's made of stuff
Lying around your house for the most part and if you're willing to put the work in, it's a much cheaper way
To develop your film at home. That isn't what appealed about it to me
I just really liked the idea of developing film with coffee
So you're probably wondering how does coffee work as a film developer? Now coffee has a host of different compounds in it
We know that already but only one of them is of particular interest. It's called caffeic acid
Has nothing to do with caffeine its present in other things than coffee
But it is a phenol and its present in lighter roasted coffees
It does degrade in the roasting process and this acts on the silver halide in black-and-white film. That's really cool
now most people who use caffenol are doing so because it's cheap and therefore they're using
Instant coffee. Instant is very cheap. Especially cheaper ones are often pretty light roasted. That's how it's confusing
But trust me, that's true. And so they're likely to have plenty of caffeic acid in them
I don't want to use instant coffee though. That seems like no fun
That's not who I am on what I do and also that would be too easy
I want to make my life a little bit harder for this particular experience. So instant is out
We're going to be using proper fresh coffee pretty light roasted. So I shouldn't have any issues and we'll talk about how I'm gonna
Re-engineer the typical caffeine or recipe in just a second. You do need a couple of other things you need vitamin C
ascorbic acid
- those of us that care about names it also acts as a developing agent
But it's a really slow acting one but together with the caffeic acid. You have a quicker developer
They work in conjunction that way this
Suspicious-looking white material is actually sodium carbonate that's different to sodium bicarbonate sodium carbonate is often sold as washing soda
Or soda ash. I didn't have any sodium carbonate at home
I had a load of sodium bicarbonate turns out if you put that in the oven and
Essentially roast it for a while. It degrades into sodium carbonate. So that's what we've got here
I've made my life again a little trickier. I've brought some potassium bromide to the game
This is common in some recipes where people want to reduce the incidence of fogging in their developing. And so that's what that's for
I think you can use some ayodhya salts instead
But I wanted to stick with the original if I'm gonna mess with other things here now
There are loads of different caffenol recipes online
I picked one I decided that was a good kind of middle of the ground version here
It is laid out to make about a litre of developer now
I'm going to be making a little bit less because I don't need a full litre
I'm only developing one roll of film in this little tank turns out if you get into photography just before a pandemic
Expect to have to learn to develop your own film at home because all the photo labs are shut
So thankfully I already had all of the toys here all the things necessary for that
So this is called a Patterson tank
It lets you pour liquids in and out without exposing the contents to light and then you need an exposed roll of film
This is medium format film which is why it looks so funny and you only get about ten photos on a single roll of film
So you can see why people would want to make the whole process as cheap as possible
when the film ends up being as
Expensive as it is. The upside of this kind of film is that you have a very large negative that captures a ton of detail
If you use it, right and like I said, I am a rank amateur here
I know very little I'm just learning
It's really early in my journey
But I thought it would be a fun little experiment for you and me first of all
I need to get this film from the reel into the tank and that
Is what this is for this is a dark bag
I could put my hands
And I can do everything inside a bag and no light can get to it
what you need to do is get the film out of this reel thread it onto this reel put it into the tank or
Inside a bag we can't see what's going on. I presume people who do this all the time. It's really easy for them
I don't know what I'm about to film myself doing something
I'm so terrible at. it'll probably be just a few seconds of me gurning and eventually me being a little bit happy that it worked
Out and then we're gonna have to mix up our solution and generally you mix caffenol right before you use it
You don't make it ahead of time too much because it does I think it degrade quite quickly and become less and less useful
Just to walk you through the process of recreating caffenol with fresh coffee
Firstly we take our 1 litre recipe and we scale it down to 750. So I know that I need 30 grams of
dissolved soluble material in there somewhere
What I'm going to do for that is basically pull a bunch of espresso
This will be much stronger than I need so I'll be diluting it down later if I pull 20 grams in and 50 grams out
I'm going to get a pretty good extraction without compromising strength too much. Now, I'm gonna pull nine doubles nine doubles of 20
So I'm gonna use a hundred and eighty grams of coffee. Now if I've done a good job and extracted 20% of that
I've actually got 36 grams of soluble material. I'm gonna go for a little bit of excess here
That's okay. Now before I can actually use that
What I will have to do is filter it this is going to be combined with photographic film
I don't want bits of stuff floating around in my developer. I don't want any tiny fines
I don't want any oils none of that stuff
So after I've pulled the espresso I will have to filter it and there will be some losses to the filter paper
I'm probably in a double filter it for the sort of safety
Initially through two AeroPress filters to get rid of the most of the stuff and then one more probably v60 filter just to clean
It up as much as possible
At the end of that. I hope to have between 400 and 450 mils very strong coffee
I expect it to be somewhere in the ballpark of like 8%
If I know how much liquid I've got and I know how strong it is
That's what these refractometers are for then. I know how much soluble material is in my jug of coffee
From that point I can then dose the necessary amount out. I can then add my other materials
I can add my ascorbic acid
My carbonate might potassium bromide having mixed those into some distilled water first to make up the rest of the recipe
Mix that all together make sure it's room temperature
about 20 degrees Celsius and we should be good to go the next time you see this tank after it's loaded is
When I'll be pulling the film out of it for the first time to see if my calculations
Were right
That's either going to be deeply disappointing or wildly satisfying. Let's load some film into the tank
To hate this bit one roll of film in the bag zip it up
I dreamed of being competent at this particular part of the process
Success. Alright, let's go and make some caffenol
Here it is, I don't know if this has worked this is my first time seeing it
You can't cheat this bit. I don't know something wrong. I don't know if I messed something up or not
maybe oh
Oh, yeah, I
See images definitely messed up some exposures here. All right, I don't actually know how these are turned out
This image is on them, which is very exciting. I'm gonna hang these to dry and
Then I'm also going to talk about a couple other things that are important
Firstly like every video right now has an ad in it. This video has a giveaway
I will pick ten people who enter the competition down below anywhere in the world if you need coffee, and you can't afford coffee
right now whatever the reason. Enter below I'll pick ten people send them coffee anywhere in the world that I'm able to send them and
Hopefully make someone's day a little bit better and I do these little giveaways
anytime there's an ad in the video and it makes me very happy to say that this video is sponsored by
Audible. Audible is the leading provider of spoken word entertainment and audiobooks for me
Audiobooks fit really well in those little pieces of my life. There's little gaps
It turns a commute that might be boring or frustrating into a moment of learning or a moment of entertainment recently
I've particularly enjoyed Michael Pollan's audiobook Caffeine
I think anyone who drinks coffee should probably listen to this not just because it's interesting but also
Because it makes you think again about the way that we drink a coffee though. I'll be honest. I'm not stopping anytime soon
They've also just launched stories.audible.com a website. You can visit to just stream stories no signups
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Thanks to audible for sponsoring this video
So a couple quick thoughts before we finish the video by showing you the images and where it was and how I shot them
Firstly a lot of people say that making caffenol smells
Incredibly bad. That's probably more true. If you use cheap instant coffee, it didn't smell good
But I wasn't truly horrified by the smell. I mean it was pretty bad, but it was not
Life-changingly awful. It was just a bit gross secondly
This was a very expensive way to do a cheap thing working out the cost involved
It is actually cheaper to have a lab develop your film than to use high quality fresh coffee to do it yourself, though
It was just super interesting to see if I could get it to work until I get those negatives in the scanner
I don't really know what kind of a job I've done. It's definitely exciting
I gotta say the moment that you pull a developed roll of film a roll that you shoot yourself
Develops yourself the moment you pull that out of a tank and see a negative is one of the most satisfying things
So I guess now we should cut to
Me shooting some photos and I'll drop the photos on top as is tradition for YouTube photography videos
Thank you very much to the Square Mile team for their patience and letting me you know, photograph them while they were working
So I'm in square-mile spitting a noisy. Sorry about the sound on this one
We're gonna shoot some pictures today and I'm going to develop those in the coffee that we're gonna be photographing being roasted today
Should be interesting. I'm gonna shooting on this which is a Mamiya
RB 67 Pro S I picked it up from eBay a little while ago. It's a medium format camera. I love it now
We're gonna be shooting
Ilford HP5 at bog speed
Which is a thing that people say come to realize that an important part of people
Making videos about film photography is that you've got to watch them load the film but they've got to skip the bit that's actually tricky
Easy right. We're ready to go. I'm also going to be wearing a mask. So
I'm not going to talk
Too much in the next little bit in case you're curious the guidance in the UK is the for workplace like Square Mile
No additional PPE is needed
It's just a case of staying separate and away from each other while we're working. Just so you know
I'm gonna try and shoot something kind of down here
I just like the window
I'm gonna shoot this one a little slower try and capture a bit more detail
Last photo is this TMS at the roaster
That was the photos or some of them at least cuz you know
Out of those ten shots not all of them were good
But I'll stick a few on my Instagram if you want to see that. Let me know your thoughts
Have you tried caffenol or did you have a different result? Have you always used instant coffee? Have you tried fresh coffee?
I'd be really interested to know your experiences. What did I probably get wrong? I'd love to hear your thoughts
But for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a great day