Stand Development

Stand development doesn't necessarily produce better results than many other techniques, but it is certainly simpler and less costly.  These images on Kentmere 100 were stand developed with 5ml of Rodinal in 500ml of distilled water, a 1:100 dilution.  That yields a developer cost of about sixteen cents per roll.  To that you have to add in the cost of fixer, distilled water and shipping charges, but the total per roll is still nearly negligible.

Time and temperature requirements for most processing procedures usually require quite precise control.  Those variables in stand development however are not critical.  In this case, I just used the developing solution at room temperature without recourse to a thermometer.  The developer was poured into the plastic film tank and the timer was set for thirty minutes after thirty seconds of initial agitation.  After that, I did not touch the tank until the buzzer sounded, at which point I agitated the tank for a few seconds and then left everything to sit for another thirty minutes.

Another nice feature of the stand development process is that no allowance need be made for different films or film speeds. It doesn't matter if you are using a slow, fine grained film like Kentmere 100 or something faster like Tri-X.

I have gotten similarly nice results from stand development using HC-110, and the cost is even slightly less as I have been able to use just 4ml of developer in 640ml of water for a dilution of 1:160.

There are a lot of recipes for stand development available on the web which advise small differences in total time and dilutions, but it seems the results are little different.  A good overview of the process is given at the hjlphotos site.