I'm preparing to teach a workshop on making and using Artemisianol, film developer made from sagebrush (Artemisia). I haven't made Artemisianol in quite some time, so it was nice to get out and harvest some sagebrush. The sagebrush was particularly lush this year, if you can ever call sagebrush lush? My wife thinks it's stinky, but I love the smell of it (especially the Big Sagebrush). Even the developer smells good to me.
Because Alisha will be giving out short rolls of Fomapan 400 at the workshop, for atendees to shoot and then develop, I picked up a few rolls for testing, made up a huge batch of Artemisianol (I wound up giving half of it away) and tested it with what has become my standard time and temp. 15 minutes at 86°F with intermittent agitation. Amongst the quite a few films that I've developed with this, I've only had one, T-Max, not work.
These shots are really nothing special at all. Just proof that the developer works as it should, it's actually one of my favorite developers.
If you live in an area where sagebrush is common and want to try making Artemisianol, here's a link to some fairly concise instructions I wrote for the workshop.
If you want to get even more adventurous, here's a link to Dagie Brundert's brilliant Yumyum Soups site, where I got the original version of this recipe from.
These were shot with my Leica Ic and Voigtlnder 21mm f/4 lens.
