Rodinal 25 50 100 200 mixes. HELP!

[Fotohuis]

Why???????

Because HP5+ and Rodinal in 24x36mm is much to grainy. (Unless you WANT grain of course)

 

[imush]

I use 1:50 most of the time and any film 400 ISO or slower. Like this:

Agfa APX100

Tri-X

Efke KB25


On a sunny, contrasty day stand development helps flatten the scene a bit:

APX100, 1:100

For this one I used 1:200 with borax (see here), and so went a bit too far:

 

[Bingley]

Quote (almost) from DF Cardwell: The mantra shouldn't be expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights but should be expose for the shadow, develop for the mid tones, and agitate for the highlights.

So I tried the minimal agitation approach to some TMax400 I shot last Monday at the Sacramento Jazz Festival. I shot at box speed, developed in Rodinal 1:50 for 10 mins., 30 seconds initial agitation, then 3 inversions at 6 mins. and 1 min., 68 degrees. Here are some samples; no post-processing on these. What do you think?

 

[Leigh Youdale]

Rodinal

Rodinal

I've only ever used it at 1+25 and 1+50.
Rodinal isn't really a fine grain developer, never mind what it says on the box, but it's pretty good!
I concur with the other writers who (in various ways) counsel against overdevelopment.

It's easy to do it with too high a concentration, hence I usually go for 1+50. I haven't tried 1+100 - sounds good but I'm a bit impatient!
It's easy to do with too much agitation. 2 inversions rather than 3 or 4 is probably the go.
It's easy to do with too long a development time or too high a temperature.
It's easy to do with over exposure - I find Neopan 1600 particularly blocks up if you're careless.

Pretty much all of those will give more grain than is possible with a more controlled approach.

 

[mfogiel]

I use Rodinal occasionally, mainly 1+50. I want acutance, so I have not tried higher concentrations, but have tried 1:100 and more. The trick with Rodinal is to know how much developer to use per roll of film, and how much to agitate. Below 3-4 ml per film the dilutions become meaningless, as you will be developing to exhaustion anyway. In fact, I believe AGFA at a certain point declared, you must use at least 5ml per film to get full development, but the practice is showing otherwise. So with Rodinal, if you want good acutance and tonality, there are some basic rules:
1- do not underexpose your film, true speed of most films in Rodinal is nominal ISO * 0.66
2- do not overdevelop, and stick to minimal agitation ( I avoid stand development with 35mm film, because of uneven development problems), try to agitate the first minute (slow inversions), and just ONCE for 10 secs halfway
3- do not develop in temperatures significantly higher than 20 deg C
4- do NOT use the stop bath
5-do NOT go lower than 2,5 ml of Rodinal per film

Here are some examples,
Fuji Acros, 1+100

Tmax 100 1+150

Tri X 1+50

Tmax 400-2 1+50