Rodinal Stand Development

 I have pretty limited experience with black and white developers. Back in college I think I only ever used HC-110 dilution B or D76, but I don't remember really loving the results as they seemed to give me clumpy grain. Picking everything back up this time, I decided to keep it simple. Since I needed to buy a bunch of stuff to get set up initially anyway, I grabbed the Df96 monobath kit from Cinestill which included the developer and a 2 reel Paterson tank. I loved the idea of minimal bottles and a one-step process and I was actually really pleased with results of my first few rolls through the monobath developer.

Delta 100, Df96

Kentmere Pan 400, Df96
However, the honeymoon quickly ended when I tried pushing a roll of HP5 and ended up with reticulation. Reticulation is a weird reaction of the silver in the film forming little "worms" giving the resulting images a really strange look. (not super obvious in these lower res scans probably but I know its there)
Reticulation with Df96

Reticulation is primarily caused by applying a thermal shock to the film during development, which is all the more easy to do when pushing the film since you typically use warmer water than normal. After some research, I came to understand that monobath developers are particularly sensitive to causing reticulation. So that spelled the end of monobath developers for me, which is what got me looking at Rodinal. 

Rodinal is super old, like 1890s old. Its a super concentrated, compensating developer which you can use in a number of dilutions to achieve a variety of results. One of these dilutions is 1+100 which is used in the Stand Development method. Instead of sitting with the film soup for 20 minutes, you just dump the developer in the tank, and walk away for an hour. The benefit of this is that it develops the shadows really well and allows you to do a lot of great contrast adjustments in post. I love how it draws out the tones and grain is really great. 10/10 definitely recommended.





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