I'm a bit confused by this (that is stand development). I've always been something of a stickler about following processing instructions. You know, said film and developer combination at this temp for so long, agitate 5 sec. every 30, etc. Stand development seems to fly in the face of this 'precision.' Is this simply a matter of earlier, vintage films and chemicals vs. modern, contemporary equivalents?
Standing development (or, Minimal Agitation) has the same potential precision as strict, by-the-book 'processing instructions'.
'Processing Instructions' are published to give the lab technician, or photographer, a simple and repeatable means to acceptable results. They offer a known and predictable result. This is a VERY good thing. This is the conventional
"Time and Temperature" process.
If you worked in a commercial or industrial lab, a newspaper darkroom, or portrait studio between 1920 and 1998, this is absolutely how you did it.
The short road to excellence is to make no mistakes, and if you were processing the film of a range of photographers, each with a variety of subjects, your contribution to their process had to be a constant: known and predictable.
A photographer adjusted the technique to suit a
constant development; a field photographer might have adjusted the exposure to ensure the important data was always in the 'fat' part of the film, and accepted that burning, dodging, and masking was just part of the game. A studio simply adjusted the lighting to fit the processing.
When the system worked, you had no failures. You seldom had a 'perfect negative', but that wasn't important.
There was no room for craftsmanship in this world, there was an absolute necessity of repeatability.
When digital imaging displaced film from the commercial world, the NECESSITY of strict Time & Temp processing vanished.
Likewise, in the early days of the 20th century,
a photo technique evolved to give consistent results with fairly coarse exposure controls. Development by inspection, standing development, and bleaches to reduce over exposed highlights were common. Making the picture was simple.
Edward Weston described his portrait technique in a 1916 article in The Photo Miniature; using a wide open lens, I hold the shutter open until I sense the subject is about to move. This summed up the way most folks worked. You needed an expert in the darkroom to develop plates. As the commercial world made use of the improved films, and papers, it was possible to take the expert out of the darkroom.
And as the BUSINESS of photography evolved, it became essential to replace the craftsman in the darkroom, with a laborer.
Today, it is all a matter of personal choice, a creative tool dependent upon the temperament of the photographer, the photographers experience, and the nature of the images the photographer wants to make.
Today, there is no longer a commercial necessity to use development as a constant. We can exploit the expressive potential of agitation as a creative control in the same way we might choose one film over another, a lens, or how we filter an exposure.
Minimal agitation (which, to our 21st century ears is a more accurate term than standing development) is as consistent and predictable as agitating 5 seconds every 30 seconds. It fits perfectly well in the toolbox of the most sophisticated photographer, as well as the photographer who cherishes simplicity.
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