Kentmere 100 in caffenol

[Ralph Turner]

I don’t profess to being any kind of expert in these matters, but I have to say I’m really liking what I’m getting with K100 in the homemade soup. This pic is nothing special, just a record shot of the shed base I’d grafted over recently and still incomplete here (shed now up and complete) but I was surprised how well the film held pretty much everything from the bright, sunlit highlights right down well into the dark shadows without any significant blowing/blocking in. To be fair I needed to tame the brightest areas of the image a little so as to balance it a little better, but the outcome was rather pleasing considering how contrasty the the light was originally. (Taken with Spotmatic SP, 55mm f1.8). The neg image here is the straight, untouched scan as outputted from Raw Therapee.

 

[Ralph Turner]

As I might have mentioned previously, this roll did dev up quite contrasty, as you can see, and I suspect would be a tricky prospect to print traditionally, but lent itself well to scanning. I may reduce the soda content of the caffenol mix a little in future.

 

[Geoff Chaplin]

I don’t profess to being any kind of expert in these matters, but I have to say I’m really liking what I’m getting with K100 in the homemade soup. This pic is nothing special, just a record shot of the shed base I’d grafted over recently and still incomplete here (shed now up and complete) but I was surprised how well the film held pretty much everything from the bright, sunlit highlights right down well into the dark shadows without any significant blowing/blocking in. To be fair I needed to tame the brightest areas of the image a little so as to balance it a little better, but the outcome was rather pleasing considering how contrasty the the light was originally. (Taken with Spotmatic SP, 55mm f1.8). The neg image here is the straight, untouched scan as outputted from Raw Therapee.

Indeed, impressive. I have to admit to never having tried caffenol though I've concocted many other brews. Maybe I should give it a try...

 

[Ralph Turner]

Thanks, Geoff. I’m also pleased at what this budget film can achieve. No doubt fp4+, hp5+ etc are technically superior but generally, for my purposes, I’m more than happy with it (and it’s sibling, the 400).

 

[Ralph Turner]

A little update to this thread. This evening I started scanning the roll of 120 that went in second place through the single mix of dev as previously mentioned. The scans were done (for convenience) on my Epson flatbed. I had something of a challenge with the somewhat excessive contrast of the negatives. Using the standard Epsonscan b+w setting, the scans suffered with strong contrast and badly blown highlights. To get found the problem I scanned the negs as if they were transparencies, then inverted in post. Using the Epsonscan’s transparency setting did capture the whole brightness range, but considerable adjustments were needed in photoshop to get the image somewhere near right. Luckily, digitising with my camera scanning rig had no problems with the contrast.
When I dev my next roll(s) of film(s) I’m going to reduce my agitation routine. Hopefully this will reign in the contrast a bit (though how much it really matters in reality, when I can get good results from sticking with camera scanning, is debatable - I guess I just want to refine the dev process for my own satisfaction). The images below are: 1) scanned with Epsonscan in normal negative mode, 2) scanned with Epsonscan in transparency mode, 3) scanned with camera scanning rig.
(Ensign Selfix 8-20, Ilford FP4+)