Stand Development Pros & Cons: Your thoughts - Large images inline

Simplicius

I was bored recently and went off talking pictures of buildings to change my routine ( yawn ), It was very sunny so I decided to further experiment with Stand Development, as conditions were ideal.

I use Stand Development when there are very high contrast situations. It has it's many advantages but also disadvantages. These are my thoughts & experiences.

What has everyone else who has tried this found?

Advantages:

Great for pulling in highlights in high contrast situations
Great for acutance
Great for developing shadow detail
Far more relaxing, than 10 secs Agitation / Min.

Disadvantages:

Risk of streaking due to lack of agitation
Edge effects, at building to sky interfaces for example leads to a white edge glow. This shows up more when enlarging in Darkroom.

These were Ilford Pan F+ (50 ISO) 35mm Film.
Developed in Rodinal (R09) 1:100 for 60 minutes. 1 minute initial vigourous agitation. 20 C temp.
Straight neg scans, no adjustments.

MODS: Sorry in advance: I've post larger than 800 pixel size because it is hard to see benefits so small,












So share your experiences, or try it and come back. or ask any questions and let's try get a film subject going before the digital tide returns!!! :P

DaireQuinlan

oh yeah, they're nice all right. I've had mixed results. Used 'properly' I've had great results, same deal as above, nice detail in the shadows, lovely acutance.





I've pushed Tri-x to 1600 and 6400 using it aswell, some success at the slower speeds, but at 6400 it started to go a bit crazy
1600:


If you wanted to see edge effects you should have some of the shots off the roll I shot at 6400. Here's probably the only usable shot from it:


I actually prefer diafine nowadays for compensating development. Not stand, but it does a mean tri-x at 1600.

As a complete aside, I've also developed C-41 in highly dilute developer and stand developed it. Worked out far better than I'd expected:

Nisio

I googled stand dev but didn't find much good detail, what's involved? Haven't come across the term accutance before with film is that like smoothness?

charybdis

Stand development means long development times with little agitation using very dilute chemistry.

Acutance effectively means "sharpness", although it really means the degree of of microcontrast as opposed to outright resolution.

I think.

DaireQuinlan

yeah acutance is basically the "sharpness" of an image, but on a sort of almost grain level, so more the edge microcontrast if that makes sense. It's achieved often at the expense of grain, reducing grain reduces the appearance of microcontrast and therefore the acutance. One of the things that makes Rodinal (for example) a high acutance developer as I understand it is that it has no silver solvents, so it maintains the original grain structure of the film.

The other thing that enhances this in stand development is what is called the 'edge effect', highly contrasty edges in the image end up even more so because the bright side of the edge exhausts the developer quite quickly and the dark side of the edge is starved of developer, ending up darker than it would do, this leads to a much enhanced contrast along the edge. Ordinarily you're agitating the developer all the time so fresh developer gets to the emulsion.

DaireQuinlan

Nisio wrote: »

I googled stand dev but didn't find much good detail, what's involved? Haven't come across the term accutance before with film is that like smoothness?

If you click through to my flickr stream for each of those images there is the relevent development details, either in the description or the tags.

Dan Jaman

I've been using D-76 in a semi-stand mode for the past year. Diluted 3:1 and let sit for up to 18 minutes, inverting once every 5 minutes. Results are reasonable with Shanghai GP3.

Simplicius

@ Daire: your C41 Stand is great. I really like the female portrait,and the child ....:D

I see what you mean by how pushing and Stand don't really make ideal bed fellows. I tend to push most stuff using Microphen stock at 24C with 'strong' agitation. results are not too bad at all. Fresh batch works best, second and third run tends to loose it's vigour.

This is in 6X6 though. I suspect in 35mm it would look like a monochrome outbreak of acne when pushed.


sample Night Shot: Ilford Delta 3200 pushed to 12,500 ISO. dev in Microphen Stock.


@ NISIO

It is basically very simple. with Rodinal or R09 as it's now called, mix a litre of solution at 1:100 ie 10ml of rodinal and 990 of water. bloody economical too as Rodinal lasts for years after opening. Lots say you need at least 10ml to get sufficient chemistry, therefore a litre. I've never risked less because old wives and photogs tales tend to be true.

Method:
bring film and tank up to 20C by leaving it stand in water of 20C temp for 3 -4 mins. Throw out water.
add developer to tank. Start Stop-watch: I strongly agitate and invert continuosly for 1 minute then about 4 strong bangs to drive of any air on film surface and put it in a corner and walk away.

come back and on 1 hour, pour out, stop and fix.

I find it works best with Ilford films for some reason and the lower the ISO the better. This is again down to grain size and accutance which Daire pretty much covered.

Try FP4+ as it has great lattitude. If you want to see difference shoot the same scene with two rolls and develop normally and with stand. (this is the level of anal dilligence required!) Although if you have good stock shots of similar high contrast scenes and you can get there again easily, next strong sunny day go there again. in the end it is subjective.

If the shadow detail is really important in the composition you are trying to achieve, overexpose by half a stop. It will help. If you are just trying to rein in the strong highlights, shot normally.

This "Stand Development" though is not a get out of jail free card for Zone exposure and Zone development (n+1) etc.... that is a whole other country:cool:.

Night shots with long exposures with Fuji Acros 100 really like stand development. Make sure you spot meter the scene correctly though. (I say Acros 100 as it avoids the whole reciprocity failure trap)

Hope this answers some questions for you.

Nisio

Loads of great stuff (info and pics) in this thread, I'll have to take some time this evening and work through it. My own regular developing tends to be slightly frantic so the idea of walking away from the tank for an hour seems strange!

DaireQuinlan

Simplicius wrote: »

@ Daire: your C41 Stand is great. I really like the female portrait,and the child ....:D

I see what you mean by how pushing and Stand don't really make ideal bed fellows. I tend to push most stuff using Microphen stock at 24C with 'strong' agitation. results are not too bad at all. Fresh batch works best, second and third run tends to loose it's vigour.

This is in 6X6 though. I suspect in 35mm it would look like a monochrome outbreak of acne when pushed.


sample Night Shot: Ilford Delta 3200 pushed to 12,500 ISO. dev in Microphen Stock.

That's pretty good for 12500 :-) Yeah often XTol is recommended for extreme pushes aswell. Rodinal is positively discouraged, but some people had gotten what seemed like good results specifically with Tri-X and stand development in Rodinal. Not sure how successful they ultimately were, it's probably more a case of shooting at a true iso that's much lower than what you think you're shooting at, and even then just picking up the highlights. I used to go pushing mad, I'm not really convinced anymore that it's worthwhile. Except for Tri-x in Diafine of course

Simplicius

DaireQuinlan wrote: »

I used to go pushing mad, I'm not really convinced anymore that it's worthwhile. Except for Tri-x in Diafine of course

I only do it during the winter month generally, it lets me get out on the streets in the evenings and use my beloved TLR. which I can easliy handhold at 1/60 without fear. practicing getting that down to 1/30 so I can pull back from 12,500.

kelly1

All this film stuff is like a foreign language to me! Nice pics guys.

sineadw

Glad I didn't have to google 'actuance'

Do you leave the water to it's own devices then temperature wise or do you put it in a bath? Wasn't clear on that.

DaireQuinlan

sineadw wrote: »

Glad I didn't have to google 'actuance'

Do you leave the water to it's own devices then temperature wise or do you put it in a bath? Wasn't clear on that.

Just left it to it's own devices, safely out of reach of little grasping hands. I actually make sure the water I make up the solution with is the same temperature as the ambient temperature in the room it's going to be sitting in.