Rodinal Stand Development for Giggles

Well, I've had these rolls of exposed Tri-X rattling around the veggie drawer in the basement fridge forever. The reason for not developing them yet? I did not mark the EI on them so I was not sure about development time. Finally tonight I threw caution to the winds and tried two new things at the same time: Rodinal and stand development. I mixed up 1.5 litres of 1:50 Rodinal solution and poured it in a tank with three rolls of the Tri-X after a five minute presoak, all at 20C/68F. I plan to let it stand for about an hour. 40 minutes to go... woo-hoo!

Just so I learn something, I used only two of the mystery rolls and included one roll known to have been exposed at EI 200. So, regardless of the outcome at least I will have a new (to me) data point for Tri-X.

Hope this works.

Jon

Usually we use dilutions of at least 1:100, and as high as 1:200 for stand development. I'd be very interested in your results!

jjstafford said:

Usually we use dilutions of at least 1:100, and as high as 1:200 for stand development. I'd be very interested in your results!

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Me too! Three films are rinsing now. I was scared away from 1:100 because of the recent threads indicating that 10ml of concentrate were required per film. My tank is only 1.5 litre so in order to accommodate 30 ml of Rodinal I felt boxed into 1:50. My gut instinct was to use the 1:100 but in the end I figured overdeveloped film was easier to deal with than the alternative. I tend to be attracted to "hot" scenes so hopefully the exta developer will be spoken for!

j

10ml per film? What extravagance!

... and I thought I was weird....!

about 20 years ago - (ack!!! I'm scaring myself) I was into sort of an early form of this. My big thing was developing Pan F or Pan-X in perceptol - approximately half the recommended minimum dilution - I'd have to wait 40 minutes for a roll of 120. I'd agitate every four or five minutes. So 'stand' development is quite interesting to me. This seems even more extreme. I really LOVED the results I was getting - but I could not imagine pushing it further. What are the results like?? Don't they seem a little to 'etched' or sabattier-like??

Jonathan

Yikes! I use 1:50 as my standard, agitate every minute dilution for Rodinal...you may have someintersting (high contrast?) results, indeed. Please let us know what came out - I am a bit of a Rodinal addict, so anything concerning the magical brew draws me right in!

Peter.

Dave Miller said:

10ml per film? What extravagance!

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I'm with Dave on this one. For stand development, I'm usually at 1:200 for one roll of film (so only about 600 ml of total liquid for a roll of 120 = about 3ml for the entire roll of film). Never had trouble with the developer exhausting...except in the highlights, which was exactly what I wanted when I did stand development.

I've heard/read that "minimum actual content" number vary quite a bit, even for non-stand techniques, I have seen it in the 6-7 ml range most of the time. I have developed using as little as 6ml - non-stand, regular agitation small tank, with good results, and no loss of highlight quality that I could percieve (whatever faults were not the developer's - all mine, baby! ) I assume and seem to be backed by most of what I read/hear about stand methods, that as little as 2-3 ml is often enough in the high dilutions. Something I will be sure to try, hopefully soon.

Mark Citret ( www.mcitret.com ) uses highly dilute Rodinal with wonderful results: looong tonal scale and compression of highlights for highly printable negatives in high contrast situations.

From his website: " He generally uses T-MAX 100 film in 4x5 Readyloads and develops the film using a 1:49 dilution of Agfa Rodinal with nine minutes duration for normal development, and a 1:149 dilution at 12 minutes for his “-3 development.”

Can't wait to see the prints from this one. I did some minimal agitation with J&C 400 and it was a bit grainy. This was 4x5, so Tri-x and 35mm with the 1:50, well it might be just a tad gritty. tim

From an ORWO R09 instruction sheet:

"For box development dilutions of 1+40 to 1+100 are preferred. In order to obtain especially well-balanced fine grained negatives the solution may be diluited up to 1+200. These highly diluted solutions should be discarded after use."

Now I know there is some disagreement over dilutions of R09 vs. Rodinal, and that the developers have a half-century of divergent modification, but from the best info I can piece together, R09 at 1:40 is equivalent to Rodinal at 1:25, making R09 at 1+200 equivalent to Rodinal at 1+125. (I don't want to hijack the thread to R09 or R09 vs. Rodinal here, this is just an observation to put the ORWO instructions in perspective. If you want to discuss R09, lets start another thread.)

That said, I've been doing APX 100 rollfilm at EI 100, Rodinal 1+150, semi-stand for 1 hour, temps between 70-75F, 30 seconds initial agitation with 3-4 inversions at 15 minute intervals. This has given me very nice looking negatives that I haven't had a chance to print yet. I tried 1+200 and 3 inversions at the half-hour, but got some streaking.

Lee

gnashings said:

Yikes! I use 1:50 as my standard, agitate every minute dilution for Rodinal...you may have someintersting (high contrast?) results, indeed. Please let us know what came out - I am a bit of a Rodinal addict, so anything concerning the magical brew draws me right in!Peter.

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Yikes indeed. I took a look at the negs this morning. To paraphrase Mr. Edison, I have discovered a very special way not to develop Tri-X. This may be patentable - I have discovered Zone 13! The negs have an ebonized appearance, and that is being charitable. How dense are they? They are so dense that they would make Ralph Gibson blush!

Seat of the pants, I would adjust to 1:200 next time. Oh well, live and learn.

j

Either that, or cut your time for 1:50 to about half an hour (probably simpler and less risky in terms of minimum developer).

Lee,

"but from the best info I can piece together, R09 at 1:40 is equivalent to Rodinal at 1:25, making R09 at 1+200 equivalent to Rodinal at 1+125."

Nope. R09 is less active than Rodinal.

1+40 R09 is the equvivalent to 1+50 Rodinal and 1+20 accords to 1+25.

Besides... I recently ran a sensitometric test of FP4+ in Rodinal 1+50@18°C in a 500ml inversion tank. The first results indicate that Rodinal pretty much dies after 16min of developing. I have to change the agitation scheme to get a higher beta, prolonging the dev time just isn´t enough.

rjr said:

Lee,

"but from the best info I can piece together, R09 at 1:40 is equivalent to Rodinal at 1:25, making R09 at 1+200 equivalent to Rodinal at 1+125."

Nope. R09 is less active than Rodinal.

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Roman,

Yes, I've also seen the claim that Rodinal is more concentrated, and we touched on that issue in another thread here on APUG, but I keep seeing info from Calbe, ORWO, and other places that indicates that Rodinal is less concentrated. I still haven't had time to run tests, but hope to sometime soon. Have you had time to do a test yet? If so, I'd love to hear about the results. I've got a backlog of a dozen rolls or more of "real" photos to get to before I can get to testing again, and that would come at the expense of printing time. As far as I'm personally concerned, the jury's still out on this issue, and only testing will settle it.

As Gainer has mentioned several other places in APUG, some films just won't go very high in contrast with Rodinal, specifically HP5+, which won't go over 0.65 when developed to completion, don't know about FP4+. If you can't get FP4+ to the higher contrast you wish, perhaps that's part of the problem. OTOH, I can easily get Efke 25 to overdevelop in R09.

Lee

Lee,

"Yes, I've also seen the claim that Rodinal is more concentrated, and we touched on that issue in another thread here on APUG,"

After replying here I recalled that debate. Yep.

"but I keep seeing info from Calbe, ORWO, and other places that indicates that Rodinal is less concentrated."

Please, show me a single source that supports this.

No Orwo publication (including "official" and the Fotokino-Verlag books dating from 1952 to 1990) I own or Calbe leaflet (Calbe leaves the customer alone in that regard, they just give mixing instructions, no times) adresses this, they don´t do ANY comparison with Rodinal nor do they actually mention the Agfa product at all.

Until our last debate (and actually still today) you are the only one I met stating that 1+40 corresponds to 1+25.

Which may be perfectly fine for you. But not "im Sinne des Erfinders" and not supported by the official documents and facts (if you allow that ;-). I have learned in the past that dev times are a very personal thing and may not be applicable by others - a friend develops R50 in Rodinal 1+25 for 7:30min@20°C (hand inversion) to a gamma of 0,65 while I target at 0,55 with 7:30min - in Rodinal 1+50!

According to "Agfa Rezepte+Vorschriften", third edition of 1957 (dating to the time when Wolfen and Leverkusen cooperated), 1+40 is the original "standard dilution" for rolling or inversion tanks (120 and 135) and the original pre-Bayer "Agfa Rodinal" (that means pre-war and Wolfen production), 1+20 used to be for trays (both papers and sheets).

Which is in fact identical to what Foma says in regard to their F09:

"Dilution
(sheet films)
1 part of the concentrate + 20 parts of water
(perforated films and roll films)
1 part of the concentrate + 40 to 100 parts
of water"

(From "Lazne_filmy_en.pdf", you can find it at foma.cz)

For a simple check - grab the specsheets and compare the times for a number of films. Take into account that Agfa targets a gamma of 0,65 and applies a slightly different agitation scheme. We´ll have to resort to the Fotoimpex datasheet for R09, which is not supported via sensitometry but was created based upon try&error and allows for a wide margin.

Perhaps we shouldn´t talk about "more or less concentrated", it´s about activity. Both the Rodinal and R09 solutions are over-saturated with potassium salts, there is not much room for higher concentrations. The production doesn´t call for a specified volume of salts but to mix them until a few of the salt crystals stay unsoluted.

As you can see by just looking at the bottle, R09 is "pre-oxidated" and comes with higher impurities while Rodinal is a clear, pale pink solution when it is fresh (and stays this as long as the bottle isn´t opened) and still clear but slightly brown when the bottle is unopened and standing in the shelf for a year or two - lesser impurities from the raw materials and a mixed and filled in protective atmosphere.

"I still haven't had time to run tests, but hope to sometime soon. Have you had time to do a test yet?"

No, not yet, I´m sorry. But I´ll have access to a densitometer in two weeks and got a stash of FP4 strips in the fridge. I´ll do it next week.

With a bit of luck, I already got results somewhere...

"As Gainer has mentioned several other places in APUG, some films just won't go very high in contrast with Rodinal, specifically HP5+, which won't go over 0.65 when developed to completion, don't know about FP4+."

Agfa adressed this differently - they say "not within reasonable time" but changed this once - one edition of the Rodinal spec sheet in 2003 or 2004 included a time for HP5+/1+50, but they returned to a blank "-" with the latest print.

They state for a higher gamma/beta with rotation and give times for that (in "C-SW16-D16.pdf").

I know the fella who did the testing for the official spec sheets and I am pretty sure I can dig out an official statement <in german> from Wolfgang Holz to that issue - he was/is a product manager BW and adressed this in a german forum.

"If you can't get FP4+ to the higher contrast you wish, perhaps that's part of the problem."

Yep. I´ll have to compensate via temperature and/or agitation. Oh, the "higher contrast" I couldn´t achieve was a beta of 0,55 - the film stopped blank at 0,50!

"OTOH, I can easily get Efke 25 to overdevelop in R09."

Ah, those nasty films with low-silver content. ;-)

Roman,

Thanks for the reply. This is information you didn't supply the last time we discussed Rodinal vs. R09 concentration, and I'm glad to see it. I haven't looked it up, but I think we got one or two other people who'd had the same impression as I had about the relative concentration of stock, and there were a number of folks on photo.net who also believed that. Since the availability of R09 has been limited in the US, very few of us over here have had much experience with it, and the available information is also limited.

I don't believe for a minute that I'm the final arbiter of what information is the best, especially when it's unsupported by documentation or testing, but I'm more convinced by the new information and sources you included here. But as you mentioned, the techniques used in the Agfa and Fotoimpex are different, and I don't recall having seen anything stating the target gamma from the sources other than Agfa, which makes comparison of published times/temps pretty much pointless. I'm sure you have better access to this kind of information than I, as much of that kind of information doesn't make it into English publications distributed here in the US. I appreciate your posting a summary here.

I have to admit that part of my skepticism about recommended development times from Agfa derives from the fact that their times have always been a bit long for me, even with a diffusion enlarger and taking the target gamma into account. That's combined with a stay in Bonn of one year (1982-1983) in which I saw a great preponderance of overdeveloped, very high contrast photography in publicly displayed work, which had no subtle midtones at all. That may have just been the current style, but it gave me a biased view of what "the average German photographer" (if we can posit such a thing) aimed for in processing. Obviously, the goals of Agfa's testing and technical department and the average photographer are not necessarily the same, but I became more skeptical of the manufacturers' recommendations as a result of the work I saw. Maybe it was folks who were printing 0.65 gamma negatives with condenser enlargers on grades 3 and 4.

I don't own a densitometer, but do reasonably well with a spotmeter, so I'll give that a go when I do get a chance to test. I'll likely do something like a 1:100 dilution with both developers and Efke 25 and same time/temp/agitation. This will only tell me how the developers compare for my typical usage, but should give a general comparison of activity levels. That's a little difficult for me to do right now, as I have no good temp control in my darkroom when it's summer, and the temps cycle by several degrees daily. Maybe I'll enlist my son to copy my handling for a simultaneous run.

Thanks for the additional information. Please let us know your results if you get a chance to make a comparison run under controlled conditions. I'm sure there are many people who'd like to see a well done comparison. Since the formulas are not exact duplicates at this point, I'd be interested in any other differences you note besides relative activity.

Have you considered adding sodium ascorbate to Rodinal to increase the gamma on FP4+? I've tried this with Rodinal and HP5+ and liked the results, however, I found I had a very slight preference for PC-TEA with HP5+.

Getting good info on R09 in the US is about as easy as finding a good Kolsch or Weizen.

Tschuss und danke,
Lee

My estimate of 0.61 as "gamma infinity" was made from developing for two times, one twice the other, by an old formula base on the exponential character of gamma vs time. It agrees pretty well with more complete data published by Phil Davis in an old issue of Darkroom and Creative Camera Techniques. While the gamma-time curve is not exactly as this simplified theory would have it (things seldom are), the usual effect of trying to get a higher gamma is a reduction as the highs become saturated while the fog increases.

There are also different ways of estimating gamma. The oldest was to take the slope of the "straight line" part of the characteristic curve. Where is the straight line portion of many current films? We customarilly use a portion of the toe. That is perhaps the reason some use lower speed ratings than the ISO: to get up onto a straighter part of the curve.

Adding ascorbate to the Rodinal working solution was something I tried on a whim while comparing the effects of adding sulfite or salt in the article "Salt to Taste". It was as we say, serendipitous, which is another, more learned sounding term for "lucky". Enough, already.

I routinely develop Agfa APX100 in 1:100 rodinal using stand development. I rate the film at 100 and develop 2 rolls at a time in a full 4 roll tank for 1 hour. I only agitate twice: 15 seconds at the start and 15 seconds at the halfway point (30 minutes). I've never once experienced bromide drag or uneven development, but I presoak for a couple minutes and use a wetting agent. To see examples, every one of my enlarged photographs on my Website was made this way.

www.scottkillian.com

skillian said:

I routinely develop Agfa APX100 in 1:100 rodinal using stand development. I rate the film at 100 and develop 2 rolls at a time in a full 4 roll tank for 1 hour. I only agitate twice: 15 seconds at the start and 15 seconds at the halfway point (30 minutes). I've never once experienced bromide drag or uneven development, but I presoak for a couple minutes and use a wetting agent. To see examples, every one of my enlarged photographs on my Website was made this way.

www.scottkillian.com

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Scott: I went to your website... very nice work. What struck me aside from the imges was your use of the SL66 for your medium format work, and your use of Amidol as a print developer. It really took me back ... I used an SL66 between ~1982-1987 (among other equipment) and all my fine prints were done in Amidol. I never used Agfa films in medium format, as they were difficult to obtain.

In any event, thanks for the input on your workflow for APX. I am going to be shooting some APX in 35mm this weekend, and will use stand development in Rodinal as a result of the input you and Lee have given here. Thanks to you, too, Lee.

The location this weekend is the Taste of the Danforth food/street festival in Toronto, and the weather forecast is for sunny and 30C temps, so there will be plenty of light and long tonal scale. The APX will be in an Olympus 35 SP, and I'll have some E6 100 in an OM w/ 28mm and 21mm lenses, and maybe a 100mm.

If you or anyone else have coments on how 35mm APX 100 might differ from the 120, I'd appreciate it.

Earl

Earl,
I recognise your dilemma. I have used APX 100 in 120 form for a while but was always put off from using it in 35mm because of the common view that it is a grainy film. As I only wanted to use it in Rodinal as well this also made me cautious of the grain issue even more. But, having used it now in 35mm form with rodinal at 1+50, rated at EI 80 I am really delighted with it. For me, the grain was a non-issue up to 10*8 enlargements and the tonality was similar (given 35mm restraints) to 120. I have now taken to adding 2 grams of sodium ascorbate as well (1+50, 8 minutes at 20 degrees, EI 80) and this is my standard now. I shoot it alot in a little canonet rangefinder as well as a T90 in am really pleased in both cases. What I have learnt is that I should not have been put off from trying it in 35mm in the first place. Go for it and good luck!

Paul

I use apx100 (120 format) a lot and use it like this:

rate it at 50 asa.

Develop 1+100 rodinal for 19 minutes at 20 degrees celcius.
agitate each 30 seconds 1 turnover of the (patterson)tank
After 10 minutes agitate once each minute.

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bij the way the fuji acros is also a very beautifull film.

Willie, beautiful shots. Thank you for posting. tim