Analogue Geek

Pandemic Archiving

How are you all doing? Hong Kong is now in the third wave of the coronavirus outbreak, that means working from home all over again.

My order from fotoimpex, a great analogue photography supply shop in Berlin, has arrived. I wanted Foma photo papers and they are not available in Hong Kong at all.

Along with the photo papers is 35mm film archival sleeves made from glassine(?) paper; I find them better dealing with humidity than plastic ones.

So here comes the pandemic archiving, I have about 190 rolls of 35mm films since July 2019 to deal with. That’s about half of them.

Haven’t been too active shooting in the street for obvious reasons, I hope you all stay safe and healthy!

In my new video I compared Caffenol and HC-110 as film developers. Caffenol is a film developer made from household products, usually by mixing coffee, washing soda, vitamin C powder and water together. As mentioned in the video, I didn’t use vitamin C in this particular experiment.

The results are quite interesting. With Caffenol, the negative has a yellow brownish tint and is less dense, meaning the negative is less developed. As a result, the end image looks darker than HC-110 counterpart.

The grains with Caffenol are also much more pronounced. It is more obvious in the 35mm Tri-X negatives.

You can check out my video for full observations. To conclude it is quite a fun experiment to have (especially you have a lot more time during quarantine).

Stay safe and keep shooting!