question regarding rodinal equivalent

hello all,

i'm travelling through turkey and apparently they don't sell rodinal here, i'm looking for a substitute but so far no luck, ilford doesn't seem to have any developers that have the rodinal characteristics (huge grain is what i'm after) , one alternative that i haven't tried is dektol but it would be little bit of a hit and miss at this point, i don't have any experience with using paper developers for film, is there a developer that provides similar results to rodinal from kodak or ilford (they only have these 2 here) ?

thanks beforehand,

ciao

There is a way to make Rodinal yourself ("Parodinal").

But that needs some expertise and facilities you might not have at hand.

thanks but obviously i'm looking for something that comes already prepared in a container..

Tetenal Paranol is a similar developer to rodinal, similar charastics, also you may be able to find some RO9 0ne shot, which is rodinal by another name and widely available in Europe, also Foma do a rodinal look alike, also called RO9, which is pretty widely available,

yes, fomadon r09 i've been using for long time, haven't tried paranol though, anyways, none of that stuff exists here, i can't buy off the net since i'm on the move..

I'd be surprised if you can't find Foma's version of Rodinal. I find Foma products quite easy to obtain in Turkey however I always made up my own Pyrocat HD Part A while in the UK (double strength) and bought the Carbonate in Izmir.

I used Rodinal for about 18 years and always had very fine grain using it, you might try Ilford DDX that should be available in Turkey.

Ian

Ian Grant said:

you might try Ilford DDX that should be available in Turkey.

Ian

Click to expand...

True, DDX gives grainy results with some emulsions, notably HP5.

What are you doing to get such "huge grain" with Rodinal? I too use it often and get decently fine grain. Huge grain is not a "feature" of Rodinal. Grab some D-76 or whatever you can get and play with under or over exposure and various development times and you'll get large grain.

fomadon is what i'm used to still can't find any foma chemicals in istanbul don't know why they don't have them, nothing from adox either, anyways, ended up using ddx 1+4 @ 30 ºC, surely nothing near the results of rodinal, does anyone have any experience with ddx @ 1+9 dilution? how do you use ddx for push processing? i don't need fine grain, sharpness, acutance etc.

If you read how Ralph Gibson et al got their gritty grainy look, it's largely down to overexposure & overdevelopment to get a well exposed, flat neg that needs printed on a hard grade of paper. This will bring the grain out beautifully. They only used rodinal because it was convenient & long lived & at 1+25ish it's not realistically any more or less 'fine-grained' than most of the competition.

In other words, if you're using HP5 & DDX, rate it at 100-200ish and give it perhaps 15-20 mins at 20c, 1+4.

If you want to really build the contrast, use PQ universal at 1+9 for 8 mins at 20c - makes a wonderfully ugly 'look' if done right.