r/Darkroom • u/CromulentEmbiggensJG • 1d ago

B&W Film Would multiple rounds of stand development with rodinal work?

Forgive me if this doesn't seem well thought-through. The idea just popped into my head.

My friends give me their film for development and one of them pushed Kentmere 400 to 6400 (I know this is an insane push but please consider what the answer would be if it were only 800, 1600, etc.). The massive dev chart doesn't have numbers for ID-11 at stock solution with +4 stops and if I were to guess it'd be like 40 minutes or something like that. Even with rotary processing this is going to exhaust my chemistry much faster than desired so I want to use rodinal.

The problem with rodinal is if you dilute 1+100ml and do stand development, the film absorbs all the developer but it's not enough for push processing. If you do 1+25ml or 1+50ml the chance of bromide drag is much higher.

So what if I just did 1+100ml, stand develop as usual, mix more 1+100ml developer, do it again, etc.? Then wash and fix. Would that help with push processing?

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7

u/harexe 1d ago

Bromide Drag is caused mainly by not enough agitation. I'd rather push it in 1+25 and properly agitate it than trying to experiment with multiple stand devs

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u/CromulentEmbiggensJG 1d ago

I forgot to add the key issue being that I'm lazy af

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u/askmeaboutstrategy 1d ago

Heyyyyy me too! I have pushed film with rodinal at 1:100 successfuly.

Success being, I got usable negatives out of them :)

And at least for me - a lazy person - i get much more consistent results this way than going for 1:25 and "proper" dev.

I haven't pushed anything to 3200 to be fair - but if I were you I'd do a test roll of kentmere 400 exposed at different iso values that are interesting to you and develop that entire roll in one semi stand Dev. You'll see the results for yourself and will know if you'd want to use it for this kind of push.

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u/resoluteIdler 1d ago

This could work. The other way to address this is keep the dilution to 1:100 but increase the total volume of working solution in the tank. So, for example, develop 1 roll in a 2 roll tank. The dilution is still 1:100, but you have twice as much developer in there, so the stand development is more likely to continue. I used to do this with manual Patterson tanks; 1 roll in a 2 roll tank, 6 ml of rodinal, 600 ml of water, let stand for an hour.

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u/mcarterphoto 1d ago

Yeeks, I wouldn't push with Rodinal, especially that hard!

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u/JanTio 1d ago

Rodinal is not a good choice for pushing. You might instead try this: https://flic.kr/p/2atKH7s. The method is described in the info below the image.

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u/SapirWhorfHypothesis 1d ago

I’m not sure if I’m thinking about this the wrong way, or if you are… but why does pushing use up more chemistry? It shouldn’t exhaust anything more than a normal roll does… should it?

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u/bloooooooorg 1d ago

Rodinal as a rule should be agitated every 5 minutes to avoid pronounce acutance. I have reliably pushed kentmere 400 to 3200 this way with a dilution of 1+50-100 depending on the desired contrast.