One of the first few shots through my 8x10, on Fuji HR-U a friend gave me. I think I'll be sticking to HP5+ despite the cost.
One of the first few shots through my 8x10, on Fuji HR-U a friend gave me. I think I'll be sticking to HP5+ despite the cost.
Beautiful, Sergei!!
Pretty hard to beat HP5! Nice image, even with the nasty scratches.One of the first few shots through my 8x10, on Fuji HR-U a friend gave me. I think I'll be sticking to HP5+ despite the cost.
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I'm going to humbly revise my comment about Rodinal lasting to eternity. I made a bunch of batches a year ago. I've been using one 800 ml bottle 50-100 mL's at a time at 4-10 week intervals and only had 50-100mL's in bottle, the rest was air. I had two sheets of 8x10 xray come out super thin 1:100 after 20 minutes, and I thought it could be an exposure error. One is a really nice photo of my wife. Then I tried to develop a 4x5 film that I know was 4-5 stops over exposed because I forgot to stop down. It came out super thin. At that point I opened a new lightly colored bottle that'd been tightly closed and tried it with some 4x5's and they came out much more like what I thought I should expect at 1:100 10 min 65 deg.
Point is yes, it gets dark with exposure to air, dramatically so, and still works, but there is a limit.
Given my highly sporadic darkroom time at this point in my life I either need to get an argon cylinder and purge everything everytime I open a bottle of photo chemicals (even powders for the ocd folks) or I need to make up one shot developers from dry chemicals.
I really wish the big portrait of my wife came out better. Maybe with grade 5 paper...
Don't know about Rodinal, but HC-110 concentrate will last for years after being opened. When I wasn't doing much processing I had a partial bottle probably last 5-6 years...never had to compensate development times when ever I mixed up a batch of working solution.
They are practically the same, Rodinal might actually last longer than HC-110 but they are both pretty much impervious to time.
I cracked the lid on my Rodinal once and the bottle sat unused and literally open to the air in my basement for 6 months and still worked fine to the last drop.
Crystallization is normal with Rodinal and you just shake it a bit and the crystals re-mix with the solution.
I can't speak for home made Rodinal I'm talking the official stuff by AGFA/ADOX that's the official formula. The R09 stuff is similar but I still stick to the official ADOX Rodinal (Adonal for you non-USA residence) as it's the latest AGFA formula before they shut down.
There's tons of info on it, anyway, to each their own.
The more crystals the sharper yet less grainy my images seem to be, I now always dump the new stock into the crystals of the old stock, my images keep getting better and better
Not joking, I compared development of old 5% full bottle to a full new one, the new clear bottle came out grainy and soft (I mean in terms of close magnification) and the old bottle was much sharper, this test came because I couldn't figure out why my new images weren't as sharp as the old ones till I made the correlation that I had started a fresh bottle, I then compared a few different bottles of Rodinal I had including an unopened actual AGFA Rodinal bottle, my results tell me that Rodinal is like a fine wine and gets better with age, also I like my wine like my Rodinal, dark and strong
Just don't mistake one for the other!!
For that to be true something has to be changing in the chemical composition (or it's a placebo). But you may be seeing something. After cracking open a new bottle (as I reported in that Rodinal thread months ago) the fresh solution acted totally differently than what I was used to. For me that's a big red flag and I am definitely moving away from Rodinal. Acufine seems to be better in every way anyway, and some of the other newer developers I am using blow Rodinal out of the water for certain films. That said Rodinal and Pan F+ are still a match made in heaven. Not that it matters for LF since it's not made in sheets.
Sounds like a placebo effect...post up your results StoneNYC
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