Newbie-Developer questions

1) 2 to 5 min. for the fix.
2) fill and dump the tank 5 times with water
3) yes

Enjoy and welcome to the wet, and dark side

TR

 

It would be 10ml Rodinal and 500ml of water. Dont mix to whole bottle at once! Mix enough developer for the amount of film you are developing. Fix the film for twice as long as it takes to clear. I use water as a stop for 30 seconds.

 

To rinse I fill and dump the tank 10 times. With Tmax films rinse long enough to get rid of the purple tint on the negatives.

 

The general rule for fixing is twice the time it takes to clear the film, although T-Max films may require longer times.
With fresh fixer, during the first minute or so, the film will have a milky appearance. When the milkyness is gone, the film is "cleared".
For most films, the total fix time will be twice that time.
For T-Max, if some pink color remains at the end of the normal fix time, give it additional time. (See http://www.kodak.com/global/en/professional/support/techPubs/f4016/f4016.pdf)

 

1. The suggestions above apply to rapid fixers. Regular fixers take longer. Mos fixers have some brief instructions somewhere on the package. Just follow them. Fixing goes to completion, so small errors in the timing are not critical. If in doubt, about six minutes would be safe for most fixers.

2. A stop bath won't hurt, but you can use a water rinse instead.

3. 10 ml of Rodinal stock solution diluted to 500 ml makes up a 1:50 solution of Rodinal, just as you said. Most developing charts show times for several different dilutions of Rodinal. Make sure you use the time for the 1:50 dilution.

After fixing, be sure to fully wash the film. It is best to wash the film while it is still on the developing reel. With the Patterson tank, you can run the tap into the built in funnel and let the spent water flow out the sides. With other tanks you might have to push a funnel down the center hole of the reel. I just put the funnel under the tap and let the water run into it at a moderate rate. A half hour with at least 8 changes of water through the tank is usually adequate, but more time does no harm.

 

Good Afternoon, Siggy,

Ten seconds each minute should be fine; Two or three tank inversions every thirty seconds is also a commonly-used approach. There's nothing especially critical about it as long as it's done often enough to have fresh fixer more or less constantly in contact with the film. About the only way to screw it up is to fail to agitate at all.

Konical

 

The fixing agitation need not be as rigorous as with development. My regimen is constant agitation the first minute. Then a couple of times during the remainder of the fixing time.

 

What are you scanning it with?

It doesn't take a darkroom to make contact prints. After you cut your negatives and put them in negative sheets, you can put them ontop of a piece of cheap photo paper, optionally put a piece of glass on top, and turn the lights on briefly. Wa-la, a page-sized 'index print' that you can file with the negative sheet. Saves you scanning or printing bad frames. Very handy for future reference (who wants to look through their computer and try to keep all that sync'd up to the negative storage) and faster than scanning the whole roll just to toss out bad ones.