Rodinal 1:100

Question to those with more experience:

Started out with 3.5ml of R-09 per/roll. I'm now down to 3.2ml and I "seem" to be getting better tonality / contrast / tones... or it might just be my imagination.

"IS" there a correlation between using LESS developer and getting better tones or contrast?




[size=-3]"I have only come here seeking knowledge...Things they would not teach me of in college"[/size]
 
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First I've read of it. There has been lots of discussion about the minimum amount of Rodinal per roll of film, needed to allow complete development before exhaustion. It sounds like you are exploring the absolute limits here for your particular combination of film, exposure and development technique.
 
Chris, just the person I needed to respond since I'm following some/all of your guidanace.

So I'm trying to understand. If I have MORE Rodinal, do I get X results? If I have LESS Rodinal, do I get Y results? Within reasonable limits that is..under 4ml lets say as a maximum...

Not even bringing agitation into the mix for now....

I guess what I'm also asking is: I'm trying for the "clearest", "crispest", "most defined" negs I can get. Where blacks and whites are clearly delineated. NOT the most CONTRASTY negs. I know a lot of this has to do with exposure and subject..and I'm really not describing this well due to my limited knowledge and expericence and vocabulary.

At the most basic: How do I make my tones "pop" on my negs given Rodinal at 1:100 in stand or semi-stand?

Thanks much brother. 🙂
 
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Was stuck in house all day. Doing Registration shots for Kodak BW400CN C-41 in R-09 (Rodinal). Shot with Hexar AF. Looking for deeper blacks and whiter whites and clearer separation between the two... Wasn't going for the min/max solution...just the solution that produced the sharpest, clearest, "tastiest" negatives.."to me".. on C-41 chromogenic.

C-41 Kodak BW400CN at Box speed. 6.4ml w/ 900 ml of water for two rolls in a 3 roll Paterson Tank.

2 min of pre-soak to clear C-41 nastiness.
1 min inverts. 5 'VERY' gentle inverts at 30 min.
Pour out at one hour.
2 min of rinse/agitation/Stop bath
Fix - 1 min of agitation, 3 min of unagitated fix
Rinse - 5, 10, 20
5 min soak/rinse
IPA rinse - 900ml of 91% IPA for 2 min.

I'm happy with the black/white crisp tonality in these shots, even if they aren't "arty" shots as a subject. The pre and post soak really helped to clear the negatives of the C-41 "crud".

deskregistration.jpg
 
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Fill. Wait a minute and five agitations.
Fill. Wait two minutes and ten agitations.
Fill. Wait three minutes and twenty agitations.

My take on the Ilford 5-10-20 rinse cycle ..adapted for C-41 needed extra rinses. Allows time for the "crud" to seep out between agitations..vs a longer post rinse at end. I'm lazy 🙂
 
Chinasaur said:
Chris, just the person I needed to respond since I'm following some/all of your guidanace.

So I'm trying to understand. If I have MORE Rodinal, do I get X results? If I have LESS Rodinal, do I get Y results? Within reasonable limits that is..under 4ml lets say as a maximum...

Not even bringing agitation into the mix for now....

I guess what I'm also asking is: I'm trying for the "clearest", "crispest", "most defined" negs I can get. Where blacks and whites are clearly delineated. NOT the most CONTRASTY negs. I know a lot of this has to do with exposure and subject..and I'm really not describing this well due to my limited knowledge and expericence and vocabulary.

At the most basic: How do I make my tones "pop" on my negs given Rodinal at 1:100 in stand or semi-stand?

Thanks much brother. 🙂
Click to expand...

I think you are on the right track to determining the best/optimal development process, for the results that you want. You are experimenting, and trying diferent dilutions, to fine-tune the results. Keep going! Keep sharing the results with us!

I think you are also on the right track in saying "I know a lot of this has to do with exposure and subject...".

I've struggled with exposure and development since I started making traditional darkroom prints, and proper contact proof sheets. Before that I made thin negatives that scanned OK and adjusted them in Photoshop or Lightroom to give the look I like on the day. Pretty easy. However many of these thin negs were difficult to print in the darkroom, and I wondered why. Eventually I stumbled on to the benefits of making proper contact proof sheets as a means of analysing my exposure and development. I now make my negs much more dense than I did formerly, and I give the film more exposure to ensure I have shadow detail.

(Good articles on the making of proper contact proof sheets here and here.)

I think what you are seeking in your negs is good tonal separation, and a good spread of tones from rich blacks through to crisp highlights. The starting point for this is the right exposure - without that no development routine can produce an ideal negative. There's plenty of good material available on this subject, but the one that immediately popped to mind when I read your words above was a presentation by Bruce Barnbaum that I viewed on Youtube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlnt5yFArWo . It talks in the terms and context of exposing in the Zone system, but the key message is to give adequate (and more) exposure than traditional guidance indicates. And he explains it well in terms of how film records light. Have a look at this and see if it fits with where you are heading.
 
Brown Base

Brown Base

I developed a few rolls using this technique, and they turned out well. Tonight however I accidentally skipped the initial water bath. A previous roll of Efke KB25 had a crystal clear base. The base of this most recent roll is a light brown color. It's kind of ugly. Other than that difference the images appear to have developed normally, but I'm still waiting for the roll to dry so I haven't looked at them with a loupe yet.

Was the lack of a prewash the cause of this problem? If not, what else could I have done wrong? Is there any chance these negatives will be printable?
 
Xtol 1+2 or 1+3 also works nicely with stand/semi stand, but not with all films. D100 gace streaking from high exposure areas, but TriX, Foma 100 etc were great.
 
Just getting to Rodinal 1:100 @ 20 min vs 60 minutes..and loving it. From a recent vacation to the Washington and Oregon interiors and coast. Legacy PRO 400 at box speed using a Hexar AF, I overexposed a bunch of rolls due to slow shutter speed (250). 1:100 @ 20 min salvaged many of them where 1:100 @ 60 min made the overexposure too great. And the sharpness and clarity is really really nice!

Comes down to waking up one morning and looking at yer stuff and thinking "Hmmmm..this looks like CRAP compared to other peoples...it's dead and lifeless grey and muddy and wanting to see what else you can do with a given developer..like....what is hoosiewhatsis doing to make his/her shots look so good/alive? Hmm...ok..I'll try some of that ..or some of this over here..or some of this way over there..." and voila! You haz a completely different look with almost no effort..

Live and learn..

I dig how the female silhouette disappears into the rocks in the first shot...

chickinrocks.jpg


metalinehill.jpg


wheatsky.jpg
 
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Excited to try the 1 hour stand.

Someone on flickr has series of photographs shot on tri-x at 400, 800, and 1600 on the same roll. Increased contrast at 800 and 1600 struck me as potentially useful. The street shooting I do that is either in very contrasty lighting, or deep shade shade. With digital I usually shoot at 800 or 1600 to get fast shutter speeds in the shade. I'm hoping I can essentially do the same thing with film and get the benefit of added contrast when in low contrast lighting and lower contrast in high contrast situations.

Seems win win. Should be able to update soon 🙂
 
Chinasaur said:
Just getting to Rodinal 1:100 @ 20 min vs 60 minutes..and loving it. From a recent vacation to the Washington and Oregon interiors and coast. Legacy PRO 400 at box speed using a Hexar AF, I overexposed a bunch of rolls due to slow shutter speed (250). 1:100 @ 20 min salvaged many of them where 1:100 @ 60 min made the overexposure too great. And the sharpness and clarity is really really nice!

Comes down to waking up one morning and looking at yer stuff and thinking "Hmmmm..this looks like CRAP compared to other peoples...it's dead and lifeless grey and muddy and wanting to see what else you can do with a given developer..like....what is hoosiewhatsis doing to make his/her shots look so good/alive? Hmm...ok..I'll try some of that ..or some of this over here..or some of this way over there..." and voila! You haz a completely different look with almost no effort..

Live and learn..

...

wheatsky.jpg
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Love that third image - and despite the overexposure you've held the detail in the sky - good job.

I routinely expose TRI-X 400 at 250 EI, so about 2/3 stop over box speed, to give me more shadow detail and better tonal separation. I've never used Legacy Pro though, so don't know how that goes, but from the look of these you're onto a good thing! What was your agitation?
 
Chris,

Thanks man..99% dumb luck. The more I learn, I see the less I know.. and I've just started with only my first developer. Humbling 😉

I agitate for 1 min. Stand for 9 min. Agitate 30 seconds. Stand 9.5 min. Some people agitate every third minute but I'm actively trying to reduce grain, and this one seems to do that better than occasional agitation over 20 min.

Legacy PRO is Neopan 400. Grain "seems" less with 20min but I can't say for sure till I do some Acros and compare.

What you shooting lately?
 
I recall doing a few rolls at 1:100, with times in the 20-30 minute area, and with agitation for 10s every 5 minutes. I think in theory the longer the soup rests, the smaller the grain will appear and the sharper the image will appear and the more chance there is for the compensating effects to work (to minimise highlight overexposure), so it's a matter of finding the right mix with sufficient agitation to prevent the uneven development problems. There's a lot of variables with that including the size and shape of your tank and reels and their thermal transfer characteristics, so we each have to find what works for us and what works for me won't necessarily work with your setup.

AGFA recommended 30s initial agitation and 5s every 30s (this is not stand development). Schwalburg recommended 30s initial and 10s every minute, and felt this was sufficient rest to allow the compensating effect to work. I have a long way to go before deciding what works best for me.

I've been fairly quiet for a few weeks. The M6 I bought turned out to have a shutter problem causing uneven exposure across the frame, so that went back, was serviced, and returned a month later with the same problem. Depressing. Luckily the seller has loaned me an M4-P in the interim. 🙂
 
Ok shot my first rolls of film ever today. Developed in Rodinal 1:100 with a 1 hour stand. Agitated with about 15 gentle inversions in the first minute. Then no touch.

Film was Tri-X exposed at 400. Scanned this with Plustek 7400 with the default Tri-X settings (whatever those are.)





I'm a little surprised that this is considered "low contrast" I guess I have a lot to learn.

Also, my understanding was that I should be able to throw shots in there that were exposed at 1600 and that they'd come out reasonably well exposed just with much higher contrast. This was not my experience and shots that were exposed at 800 is looked more underexposed than "contrasty."

Am I massively misunderstanding how this works?
 
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#1 and #3 look high contrast to me. Who tells you they are low? But then, the phrase "ich bin ein N00bie" applies to me re: developing 🙂
 
Yeah 1, and 3 is high contrast and is overexposed / overdeveloped. The middle one is fine.

Although this is straight scan, I am sure you can easily recover the overexposed bits on both pictures with 30sec minute in Photoshop 🙂

Sharpness is fantastic though it seems, just sit with photoshop for a minute. Just make sure you scan your pictures in .tiff of course.
 
JayM said:
Ok shot my first rolls of film ever today. Developed in Rodinal 1:100 with a 1 hour stand. Agitated with about 15 gentle inversions in the first minute. Then no touch.

Film was Tri-X exposed at 400. Scanned this with Plustek 7400 with the default Tri-X settings (whatever those are.)







I'm a little surprised that this is considered "low contrast" I guess I have a lot to learn.

Also, my understanding was that I should be able to throw shots in there that were exposed at 1600 and that they'd come out reasonably well exposed just with much higher contrast. This was not my experience and shots that were exposed at 800 is looked more underexposed than "contrasty."

Am I massively misunderstanding how this works?
Click to expand...

Hi JayM,

As you can see, the development you did worked well for the second shot: the scene with lower contrast as there's no direct sun generating a much higher contrast because of the wild difference between bright light and really dark and defined shadows...

All you have to do is develop differently those sunny scenes with much higher contrast.

If you prefer not to do it that precisely, you can use the same development time for soft and harsh light: a middle point... Then your negatives will be soft light scenes that could have been developed for longer: for more contrast, and sunny scenes that could have been developed for a shorter time: for less contrast, and then while wet printing or after scanning, you can try to get the most out of any frame...

Cheers,

Juan
 
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