Trafford Park and Salford Quays at Night

I shot three films today with a view to testing the use of paracetamol as a reducing agent in film developer. The two I ran off in Southern Cemetery (36 exposures of HP5+ and 36 exposures of Delta 400) were both developed in the following solution, following a Tylenol recipe on the ascorbate-developers blog:

• Na2CO3 (anhydrous) — 24g
• Vitamin C — 7g
• Paracetamol — 1g
• KBr — 1g
• Water to make 650ml

I was a little concerned about whether this was going to work, so I left a piece of fogged film in the top of the developing tank to track the progress. After the recommended time, 9 minutes, the fogged film had barely darkened. I kept checking every now and then until, eventually, it seemed to have the same density of other fogged developed film I have used. That was after 34 minutes at 23ºC. Unfortunately this 300% extra development was not enough to produce good images on the exposed negatives: the edge-lettering on the film is not legible, and there is barely any density to the shots. I consider this an almost complete failure. Only almost, however. The third film, mostly shot at night around Trafford Park and Salford Quays, I developed in Caffenol CCL. It came out a treat. However, the shots which were exposed as metered (at ISO400) are weak. The night shots vary from +2 to +3 stops overexposed and have good density. Therefore I think the Delta 400 should be treated as an ISO200 or even ISO100 film when developing in Caffenol CCL (or development time should be significantly increased). However, if treating the Delta 400 as an ISO100 film, it should also be noted that FP4+ at ISO125 produced stellar results, with grain that I believe was better than the Delta 400 shown above. I will have to experiment with Delta 100 and Pan-F 50 developed in Caffenol before I decide what to buy as my next bulk rolls. Full set of photos here.