Quote Originally Posted by horseman89 View Post
I am however curious about why so many photographers seem to get so agitated (boom) when stand dev is brought up... but maybe thats for another thread. Why clamp down on creative exploration? Thats why we're all here... right?
Respect for the pun. Personally, I'm relatively new to doing my own development. Being a nitwit, I leapt into 4x5 and 120, B&W and color, all within the space of... about two weeks. I like the efficiency of the SP-445, but like the capacity of the 20th century film reels. Didn't like the design of the mod-54 because I consider it a bit fiddly to load (more so than the 20th century reel).

But I don't understand stand development-- by which, I mean, I get the concept, but I fail to see the attraction. The whole point of agitation is periodically equalize the exhausted and fresh developer throughout the tank, ie, moving the potentially exhausted developer away from the film-- you can accomplish this by rotating continuously in a roller tank, you can do it intermittently with agitation, or you can do it in the least efficient way possible, by relying on concentration gradients.

The "benefit" is that you don't have to agitate, but in order to ensure even development, well... YOU CAN'T!!! Sorry. Ok. Obviously, you can, by waiting longer, but again-- you're relying on concentration gradients to ensure that ever bit of silver equally exhausts the nearby developer, and then over the next N number of minutes, enough fresh developer leeches into the exhausted zone to finish the developing process.

At least with agitation, once every 30 or 60 seconds, you're effectively redistributing all the developer throughout the entire tank, and even with the SP-445 and it's tendency to leak, it's just not that difficult. The paterson, when properly sealed, simply doesn't leak.

What am I missing?

There's creative exploration, and then there's just shooting yourself in the foot to see if it hurts.