Wineoldrogen Peroxide Reversals Part 1
a tale of semi-successful darkroom experiments
As far back as high school, when I started developing film, I’ve always enjoyed oddball kitchen experiments. After getting my feet wet with some extremely dubious C-41 processing, I found myself getting into the caffenol community, attempting to develop film with the tasty combo of instant coffee, vitamin C, and washing soda. This was my mainstay developer for a few years, until I finally had to give up and switch to a “real“ developer, once I started printing my work
Jumping forward a few years, I found myself in a conversation with a good friend, who brought up the idea of developing film in coffee, wine, and other dubious liquids. After a bit of discussion on the topic, we hatched a plan to give wineol a shot, only with a slight twist. Rather than using it to develop film, we’d use it as a secondary developer in a paper reversal process, a twist on something I’ve been messing around with for some time.
For the uninitiated, most black-and-white films are developed as negatives, a process where the image captured on film with inverted brightness; this is then projected onto darkroom paper (which is also negative) to produce a positive print. That being said, it’s also possible to develop films (and darkroom papers, for that matter) as direct positives with a little bit of chemical trickery.
This reversal process was traditionally done by using a type of bleach with a whole host highly potent acids, which are not something that I particularly desired to have kicking around the house, so I opted to try using a different concoction of hydrogen peroxide and vinegar. Trouble is that in order to do this, one needs a fairly heavily concentrated variant of hydrogen peroxide (9%), which is typically only found at beauty stores, and is pretty potent in-and-of-itself, aloing with a smidge of vinegar for acidity. I opted to give regular drug store hydrogen peroxide (3%) a try to compensate for its relative weakness by heating it up to 55º using my sous vide.
My first round of tests were done using a combination of Ilford Multigrade IV RC Glossy and MultiTone Pearl Papers with the following process:
First Developer (Ilford Multigrade @20ºC): 1 Minute
Wash in running tap water: 1 minute
Bleach (16oz hydrogen peroxide and 1 oz white vinegar at 55ºC): 2-3 minutes
Open the tank and expose the paper sheets to light: 1-2 minutes
Second Developer (Multigrade again): 1 minute
Fixer (EcoPro Legacy): 2 minutes
Final rinse and hang to dry
Below are the results:
We used largely the same process for our first Wineol attempt, substituting the second developer for a concoction of 150ml of the cheapest wine we could buy, 1tsp of instant coffee, 1/2tsp of vitamin C, and 1/2tbps of washing soda. Unfortunately, I forgot that one isn’t supposed to use a stop bath after the first developer, which lead to some extremely dubious results. You can see from the first image where the reversal almost worked, however, each attempt thereafter becomes increasingly suspect. By the time we got to the final image, I was desperate to get any kind of redevelopment on the paper, and tried pouring some undiluted Multigrade on the paper (which worked about as well as one would expect).
I only realized about a week later that the stop bath had been the issue, so in due time, we gave it a shot again, using the same process without the stop bath.
Due to my own belief that all my film holders were loaded (they weren’t), we only got one image out of this attempt. Though it’s clearly underexposed (we rated the paper at ISO 25, where we should have been aiming closer to ISO 6), it actually worked, as you can see below.
Special thanks to my friend Pratap for helping out with this! I’ll post additional update once we’ve had another go at this and are able to develop something of a guide for those hoping to replicate the process on their own!
