Caffenol: Developing Photos with Coffee and Vitamin C [video] | Hacker News Reader

Caffenol: Developing Photos with Coffee and Vitamin C [video]

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I'd never imagine I'd see James Hoffmann featured on HN's front page. If I knew you guys would have liked him, I would have linked his stuff ages ago.

He recently borrowed a high speed camera and filmed espresso, and, somehow, produced beautiful art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzEiZdcss88

I definitely believe James Hoffmann is a kindred spirit to your average HN user. He's obsessed with detail, methodical processes and high quality results. I wouldn't be surprised if he's dabbled in programming or educated as an engineer.

Plus his hair and clothes game is on point

Also, World Barista Champion 2007.

With significantly worse hair though :D

His routine that won him that (with his own commentary): https://youtu.be/_DwZV17bek4

> I wouldn't be surprised if he's dabbled in programming or educated as an engineer.

Not sure, but he's involved with Sudden Coffee [0], a YC company.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gUoMAhcTC0&t=1m40s

I don't think trying to build stuff in Visual Basic in my early teens really counts, and I have the world's fluffiest arts degree. But I aspire to the skills and approach of an engineer!

James has actually shown up here a few times. His style matches the tastes of people like us.

I tried searching for threads, but HN search isnt built for finding youtube videos by creator

Seems to be him? https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jimseven

Sorry, by “shown up here” meant his videos have been posted a few times. I dont think James spends his time on this site, he’s too busy being fussy about grind sizes.

This is James Hoffmann's channel. He is very conscientious in his videos, which is oriented towards espresso and coffee. Besides for coffee, the drink, he cares a lot about usability, beauty, but also practicality of things he reviews.

If you tried an espresso, it tasted bad and wonder why people would drink it, his channel will be enlightening.

Not to mention he often criticizes products for their sustainability and waste products!

This is great, but I am frustrated to see the effects of Google's 10 minute "minimum". The video did not need to be 13 minutes long and the filler parts were obvious. At scale, this is uncountable thousands of hours of human time. I dont know if that's important, but it makes the experience less genuine.

What is Google's 10 minute "minimum"?

I think you either only get paid for, or get paid a great deal more for, videos that are at least 10 minutes. Even high quality YouTube produces often make videos that are exactly 10 minutes and 30 seconds, and it's sometimes fairly obvious.

Videos under 10 minutes can only have 1 ad (I'm not sure but I think it's only short ads too) so you get less revenue per video. The algorithm also favors longer videos because more watch time means the video is more likely to be recommended to viewers. But there are rumours that being over 10 minutes specifically is what matters most to the YouTube algo.

This might be true if there were mid-roll ads, which there aren't on this video. I just liked it this way.

Alternative processes are pretty cool, but you still need regular fixer for fixing the final image. That's by far the nastiest chemical in b&w chemistry and can't really be replaced. I've once read you can get a similarish result by essentially storing the film in rather concentrated salt solution for several hours to days, but that doesn't seem quite practical: http://www.filmwasters.com/forum/index.php?topic=7958.0

Are you talking about sodium thiosulfate? It's less acutely toxic (oral LD 50) than table salt in animals, has no known chronic health risks, doesn't persist in the environment, and is non-flammable.

Yes, but once it becomes laden with powdered, precipitated silver it is far less benign. Silver is still a heavy metal after all, even if it is not the most acutely dangerous one.

The problem then is the dissolved silver, not the thiosulphate.

And just evaporating it down should be a suitable concentration step, if not just electroplating the silver out of solution with a graphite anode or something like that.

This is true with regards to fresh fixer but, once it's used it contains silver which, as reported by, sciencedaily.com:

"We found that silver nanoparticles are extremely toxic. The nanoparticles destroy the benign species of bacteria that are used for wastewater treatment. It basically halts the reproduction activity of the good bacteria."

I photograph onto paper, develop with caffenol, digitize after the stop bath (quickly) and discard the paper so as to avoid using fixer. Yes, there is silver on that paper but I'm hoping that silver in an incinerator or even landfill is better than silver in the wastewater.

Back in the day when analog photography was just called photography, there were inexpensive silver recovery filters available. Now, if you want to use fixer, try to find a local film lab that will take your "spent" fixer.

Well, no. It's illegal (in any coherent district) to put hard chemical waste (like silver) into the wastewater. you either take it to, as you suggested, a local film lab, or you clearly label it, build up several gallons of it, and take it to a chemical treatment factory, or whatever distribution process you have to get it there. Like NileRed does.

Allegedly sea water is a pretty good fixer too. It's not the NaCl which does it, but some other elements in the sea.

You think that’s bad? People that do wet plate collodion photography the old fashioned way use potassium cyanide as their fixer.

I use Caffenol LC-C for Agfa Copex Rapid (a microfilm stock that needs very low contrast development). With other microfilms I use dedicated commercial developers, but it's hard to source the Spur one for Copex Rapid.

https://i.lensdump.com/i/WNPsAx.jpg (Leica M6 TTL, Elmarit-M 90/2.8, Agfa Copex Rapid, Caffenol LC-C)

https://i1.lensdump.com/i/jY29hM.jpg (Leica M6 TTL, Elmarit-M 90/2.8, Agfa Copex Rapid, Caffenol LC-C)

https://i1.lensdump.com/i/jY2qCQ.jpg (Leica M6 TTL, Voigtlander Ultron 35/1.7 VM, Agfa Copex Rapid, Caffenol LC-C)

It's nice to see that such a simple process can lead to such good results.

Without a comparison to a commercial developer, it's very hard to tell what the effect on the negatives are. The roll of 120 he held up looked very dense to me, and looked like it was suffering from a fair degree of fogging between the frames. Saying that, if he's scanning the negatives there's plenty you can do in post to pull an image off of the negative.

I'll stick with Xtol as my developer of choice, but that's just because i've been using it for such a long time it's a habit rather than an informed choice from having compared the options today :) Funnily enough it's active ingredient is ascorbic acid as far as i'm aware (vitamin C).

Caffenol is a pretty popular technique, you can find many detailed posts online comparing it with other developers.

I've used it a few times in a pinch when traveling, it's nice. Unfortunately I've never been able to find a fixer formula that's as easy/off the shelf.

here's a visual comparison of various developers, including caffenol: https://web.archive.org/web/20181022154200/http://fotoimport...

Yeah, that's a really handy resource. Shows what i'd expect, with a heavy grainy look to caffenol, but I can see it being useful if that's your thing

I expected much "worse", the graininess isn't bad at all IMHO.

I completely forgot why I was watching this video or how I came across it, but I found it quite enjoyable. A nice afternoon distraction from work.

This man looks like a younger relative of Steve Buscemi. But on a more serious note, the channel content is great.

I wonder if Kodak's Ascorbic Acid-Based XTOL Developer was inspired by this idea.

Xtol was created in 1996, making it the last really new developer. My understanding is that one of the design goals was to make a developer that was less toxic, and that ascorbic acid was part of it. I wish they still sold it in 1 liter increments. The current package makes 5 liters which means its hard for me to use before it goes bad.

Can you separate the two powder packets by weight into 5 parts?

Yes. I like to weight it out on a digital scale and make 2.5 liter batches. Seal the bag of unused powder with tape.

Generally it's better to avoid doing this, because you're unlikely to get a even split of the ingredients in each packet.

It has lasted 2 years for me if done with distilled water and stored in soda bottles with no air.

James Hoffman is great. I love his videos they are singlehandedly sending me deeper and deeper down the coffee rabbit hole

I was just talking with my girlfriend yesterday about the various reasons for overlap between coffee nerds (espresso and pourover) and software engineers. Delighted to see this video here (I usually pick up his video links from Reddit), though it does come across as potentially peak hipster.

Related qn: are there any good guides to building a pinhole camera?

MacGyver Feelings

James is so cute

How is this relevant for HN?

Because coffee

[video]

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