Silver Recovery from Exhausted Photographic Fixer

I've been saving my spent fixer for the past 2 years, after learning how much silver it contains. Rather than sending valuable silver to the hazardous waste facility and gaining nothing from it, I decided to make an attempt at extracting the silver myself.

Whereas there are several methods for precipitating solid silver from the solution of silver thiosulfate, I opted for the cheapest method, the iron reduction reaction. I used 0000 steel wool in a flask of fixer solution on a magnetic stirrer to precipitate the silver.

Left: the flask of fixer with steel wool being added under stirring. Right: the flask after 2 minutes of stirring, with a noticeable amount of silver already having precipitated.

This is approx. how much steel wool I used for
1 L solution. The piece had a mass of ~1.5 g.

After allowing the flask to stir overnight, I placed a magnet onto the side of the flask to collect any remaining iron filings that didn't react. Luckily there were very few, and I was able to decant the silver precipitate into a beaker for washing. I didn't take photos during this process, but I washed the silver several times until the water remained clear between rinses. At first the water was turning yellow during washing, but the yellow color went away after 3-4 rinses. I suspect there were still iron salts in solution.

I collected the dry powder and melted it in a crucible with a little borax for flux. My oxy-propane torch made quick work of it! The silver piece weighed in at 3.17 g.

I'm quite happy with this yield; it seems as though I extracted nearly all the silver from the exhausted fixer. I'm still curious what the theoretical yield is for a 1 L fixer solution, so I think I will make another post in the near future with some calculations to figure out those numbers.

Photoshoot Breakdown #1

 

I recently edited this photo together as a promotional pic for one of my musical ensembles. I'm extremely happy with how it turned out and I wanted to break down how I set up the shot and how I edited the photos together for the final photo.

My original vision was to have the bassoons set out in front of the subjects, larger in scale but still reasonably in focus. A fully black background would allow for blending the four photos together in post, and a single key light would illuminate the subjects with dramatic Rembrandt shadows. Here's a sketch of the setup I used:

The foamcore board was specifically used to ensure that no part of the subject would appear on the left side of the bassoon, and to black out the left edge of the photos to facilitate the final edit. I used a parabolic umbrella to reduce light spill, and with an already black background it was very easy to keep only the subjects illuminated.

A little airbrushing was used between the shots to blend each portrait into the background, but overall the digital edits were not too time-consuming. I like to do as much work in-camera as possible, and save myself the trouble in post!

Bleach Bypass Development with Expired Vericolor III VPS

I recently purchased a couple expired rolls of Kodak Vericolor III VPS 6006 from my local film store, with a couple experiments in mind but low expectations. For this roll I wanted to attempt bleach bypass processing to boost the contrast of this ~30 year old film and to see if my normal B&W fixer is compatible with the C-41 process. I didn't expect the results of my first test to be so good, so I have very little in the way of photos throughout the process. But I did write down my processing steps so I will be able to share how I shot and developed this film.

The Shoot

I loaded the roll into my handy Holga 120N, with the 645 mask in place. The weather was overcast but dry on the day I went out to shoot, but since I was overexposing the film by a stop (80-100ASA) I brought my tripod, light meter, and shutter release cable along to be as accurate as possible with my exposures.

The Development

All development steps were carried out at 38C, the normal temp for C-41. I used the ADOX C-TEC developing kit, having mixed up half a batch and this roll being the last of the 8-roll capacity for half the kit. The fixer I used is the EcoPro Neutral Fixer. Based on what I've read, it is important for the fixer to be neutral and non-hardening so that it is compatible with color negative film.

Here is my bleach bypass process:

1. Film pre-rinse (two rinses in this case)
2. Normal first step C-41 Developer (using instructions from C-41 kit)
3. Water wash to stop development
4. B&W Fixer (5 minutes 1+4 dilution)
5. Water wash several minutes
6. Stabilizer (1 minute, included in my ADOX kit)
7. Final water rinse and hang to dry

The Results

The film base was a little bit dark to the eye, but the negatives appeared well-exposed. I scanned the negs on my flatbed scanner and here are the results. Click the images to view them full-sized.

Conclusions

For a roll of film roughly 30 years old, I think these results are spectacular. I anticipated that some speed would be lost over time, hence my decision to overexpose by a stop. Bleach bypass development adds approximately a stop of speed as well so in effect I have overexposed this film by 2 stops, which appears to have been the perfect exposure. I hope to try this again on unexpired films, which I will probably underexpose by a stop to see if that speed gain is accurate. Since I use the EcoPro Fixer for developing B&W films and papers anyway, I didn't need to purchase a different product for this test. I'm sure other fixers exist that would work with the process too; I'm eager to see if anyone reading this has success with others and if so, please leave a comment.

Thanks for reading, and I hope to see others try this out as well!