Iron Film Developer

Why it Matters

Abundance. Iron, especially rusty iron requires no special extractive process. It is available all around us. The first iron developer was actually developed in the 1930s but because, at the time, it was hard to play around with exposure due to the cameras available at the time, it was abandoned to history. Curiosolab is researching this area in conjunction with the Sustainable Darkroom.

So in order to use iron as a developer, I had to over expose my images by two stops. My first experiments were quite ethereal and scratchy, but once I got the temperature correct, the results were really surprised me.