Chemicals

One of the things that became obvious fairly early on was that my chemicals were going to last much longer than I had initially suspected. Rodinal is a one-shot developer, so cannot be re-used, but is used in such small quantities (at 1+50, only 20ml is needed to make up 1L of chemistry) to not be a problem. 200ml of Ilford Rapid Fix is needed to make up a 1L solution, but I soon found from the forums out that everyone re-uses their fix, often quite a few times over quite a long period of time. Only 50ml of Ilfostop is needed to make up a 1L solution, and it’s pretty cheap anyway, but even this can be re-used. Ilford say that it’s good for a week, but looking at various discussion forums would suggest that people keep it for longer than this. Apparently, if kept too long Ilfostop begins to grow mould/fungus, so given that it’s not expensive I guess that it would be best not to keep it for longer than a couple of weeks.

One thing that was slightly annoying was that the Ilford/Delta 100 and Agfa/Rodinal data sheets both specify different development times and agitation methods for developing Delta 100. Ilford recommend 14 minutes at 20 degrees with a 1+50 solution for film shot at 100ISO. Rodinal recommend 16 minutes under the same conditions. Agitation strategies are different too. Ilford recommend 4 inversions during the first 10 seconds of each minute, whereas Agfa recommend continuous agitation during the first minute and then a tilt every 30 seconds. As my first negatives were too dark I’m planning to try following Agfa’s recommendations next time, as I think this will work better with the MOD54. With the first negatives that I developed I used a 14 minute development time, but was hesitant to invert the tank too rapidly as I was worried that the film might become dislodged from the MOD54, so I did one slow inversion (not the recommended four) during the first ten seconds of every minute, which, on reflection, was probably not enough.