Developing with gorse

Yesterday I spent the evening in the darkroom at Photosynthesis developing some 4×5 black and white negatives using gorse flowers. Gorse is not a native plant here in New Zealand but is an introduced species which unfortunately grows very well and drives out native plants. It does, however, as do other plants, contain polyphenols and these can be used to develop film. A more common process is Caffenol which is quite similar. 

We spent a few hours on Sunday afternoon collecting gorse flowers and taking some images to develop and spent the evening fixing the gorse flowers with washing soda, salt, and vitamin C to create a developer. I shot Ilford HP5 film and that takes about 32 minutes to develop with the gorse developer. I was pleasantly surprised at the results. This was also the first outing for a new 90mm lens on my 4×5 and the wind made my attempted macro shot very optimistic at best.