Rodinal basics

[Bob Michaels]

Same here. But sometimes, certain Rodinal users are like certain Leica users: they will not listen to anyone who says that their choice is not perfect for everyone. Or, of course, they'll accuse you of incompetence, laziness, lack of moral fibre...

The pics here show that it works very well for some. Your experience and mine demonstrate that 'some' is not the same as 'all'.

In addition I think there is a group that believe Agfa, just like Kodak, never really tested use of their products over the last 100 years. Nor is there much user experience to call upon. So they can readily believe that they have made some new technical breakthrough that is universally applicable.

 

[BW400CN]

I have done that with XP2 and developed in Rodinal 1+25 for 25 minutes

iso200

iso1600 Potter shot through window

that´s interessting!
The Ilford XP2 is a C41 film - but you delveloped it in Rodinal? The result is great - so I maybe should try the same with the Kodak BW400CN.

 

[gsgary]

For BW400CN
I have also developed some out of date BW400CN in Rodinal that was given to me same developement as above, there not great shots but i read on a forum that it did not work well so i had to try

 

[BW400CN]

Thanks - I will try it soon!

 

[Roger Hicks]

Thanks Roger. It is interesting that we can get so excited about our pet techniques (I am as guilty as any). When I first discovered stand development I tried times out to 2 hours, convinced I was really on to something. Then the uneven development started to become apparent. I tried a number of variations - spacing the spool up from the bottom, different dilutions and minimum cc's of rodinal per roll, size of tank, types of spool, etc, all to no avail. Not for me.

This is partly why I was so interested to find times of 15 and 20 minutes for 1:100 dilutions in the AGFA chart, albeit with their regular agitation routine (30 seconds initial then 5 seconds every 30 seconds). This worked OK for me. After reading more widely I found recommendations for reduced agitation as a means of compensating the highlights, and tried agitation every 5 minutes over a 20 minute dev time (still with 1:100). Then I learned of John Carter's preferred agitation routine. A further mote of data came from Michael Johnston in a note that rodinal 1:100 became fully exhausted after something like 18 minutes (and therefore any time beyond that was simply wasted).

Roger - have you done any formal testing along these lines - to determine the time it takes for one roll of 135 x 36 to exhaust 2.5ml of rodinal in solution?

I'm going to revisit the Schwalberg article and run some tests using his recommended time/dilution/agitation. What has struck me with many of the samples shown here and in other rodinal discussions (and in many of my own negatives, especially in 135 format) is the muddy mid-tones and lack of tonal separation. In his article Schwalberg uses the terms "brilliance", "gradation" and "sharpness" to describe the desirable characteristics. I haven't seen any use the term "brilliance" lately, but I suspect it means the opposite of muddiness. I want to get some of that brilliance into my negatives. I think part of the answer is in giving sufficient exposure to the negative to lift the lower and mid-tones well away from the toe of the exposure curve (as explained by Bruce Barnbaum in his YouTube clip).

Dear Chris,

Sorry, no. For three reasons:

First, the subject matter, lighting and exposure make an enormous difference if you're talking about 'exhaustion'.

Second, with extremely dilute developers, 'exhaustion' is a somewhat flexible concept, because of oxidation/hydrolysis. Normal agitation levels with a very dilute developer will give a lot more development than stand development.

Third, life ain't long enough. Sure, it's necessary with silver halide to be process oriented as well as goal oriented, i.e. you have to care about what you're doing as well as about the results you get. On the other hand there comes a point where the process takes up so much time that if you care about the goal at all, you may have forgotten what you care about by the time you get the result. Frankly, after a few attempts at stand development, I decided that I cared more about the picture than about investing another 10-20 hours in the process. The more so in that processes others had described as successful are far from reproducible.

Cheers,

R.

 

[ChrisN]

Just adding a link here to another useful thread on Rodinal development times and dilutions, which shows a chart that takes lighting contrast into account.