Potato Review

www.potatoreview.com POTATO REVIEW MARCH/APRIL 2021 41 ALTERNATIVE USES suddenly had an over-abundance of creativity that morning, so things just went from there. “I’ve been inventing ways of doing things with the gear I have at home ever since. It’s amazing what a lockdown does for good ideas.” So what made him think of potatoes? He continued: “I’ve always been looking for less toxic developers. Having tried coffee as a developer, I found it wanting. I did a little research into the basic chemistry and found a chemical group called Phenols were involved somehow. I’m a mechanical engineer, not a chemical engineer, so I looked up which foods had Phenols in them. “Some way down the list, there were potatoes, and I just happened to have three baking potatoes of around 300 grams each. I figured that the cells in the potato were the chemical factories, so smashing them up was a way to get these out. That’s where my blender came in useful.” During lockdown, Mark was placed in the extremely vulnerable group because of an immune system illness. As camera shops were, on the whole, closed during this time, it meant his options were limited outside of ordering online. If he wanted an ‘immediate’ solutions his choice was coffee and potatoes. “I cut up the potatoes (300 grams) and put them in the blender with 500 ml of tap water and blended then thoroughly. Having no proper filter, I improvised with a washing up sponge / scrubber and a simple 3D printed box. This proved adequate for separating the fibre and other stuff, then added water to make up 1000 ml of liquid. To this, I added eight teaspoons of washing soda and two teaspoons of vitamin C and stirred. “The washing soda is important to the development process and was carried over from the coffee developer recipe I’d used from the web site caffinol.org ,” he said. Mark said the trial and error of the process was finding the right amount of time to put the film into the developer for. “I’m physically disabled and suffer from muscle spasms and arthritis so on the fourth attempt, I left the film developing on its own for two hours,” he said. “I fixed the photo and washed the film in water. To my delight, the film developed normally, much like a commercial developer but without the unfriendly chemicals.” Mark has now dubbed his newfound-developer “Tatosol C”. “I have always wanted to find a more environmentally friendlier way to do my developing, it’s one of those things I did with a feeling of guilt. It’s my view that people have got used to throwing away things when they break. Living in a poor area of Brighton and Hove, I see many things left out by the bin. More so than in the richer areas of the city,” said Mark. “Being a mechanical engineer, and quite practical, I take these things, fix them and sell them, or just take them apart for parts. For example, I used some LED lights and a part of a flat screen TV to repair an old light box for viewing photographic negatives. My mobility scooter has a battery I hand built from defective e-bike batteries. It runs for much longer than it used to, plus the range doesn’t suffer in the cold. Using coffee as a developer seems wasteful - it’s only grown in a few places and getting it in the refined form costs a lot of energy. “Potatoes can be grown by anyone in the UK, even on balconies in bags!” Mark isn’t the only one who has tried the novel approach to photo development. An online blog by another amateur photographer in the US, who calls himself Spudsanol, also puts forward the potato method. He recommends saving one litre of boiling or still-hot water after boiling potatoes, adding 50 gram washing soda and 15 gram ascorbic acid powder while stating that potassium bromide is also recommended to combat fog.

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