Pyrocat hd stand

[Camerashy]

 

[thronobulax]

Having done a ton of testing in this area last year, my findings were that true Stand - agitate once and then never again until complete - is subject to bromide drag and streaking. Semistand - agitate once, and then again at the midpoint - works consistently and reliably well. Exreme Minimal Agitation - agitate once and then 2-3 times during the development interval also works well.

I captured my findings here:

tundra/Stand-Development

gitbucket.tundraware.com

 

[Ian-Barber]

@thronobulax in your article you mentioned that under no circumstances would you do stand or semi-stand in a plastic tank such as the Paterson. Out of interest, did curiosity get a better of you and I was wondering if you did actually try it to see just how bad the results were.

 

[thronobulax]

@thronobulax in your article you mentioned that under no circumstances would you do stand or semi-stand in a plastic tank such as the Paterson. Out of interest, did curiosity get a better of you and I was wondering if you did actually try it to see just how bad the results were.

What I actually said was, Under no circumstance would I use the adjustable plastic reels sometimes found in cheaper kit. The ridges for holding the film in place are tall and inhibit smooth developer flow. Using this just begs for bromide drag problems. This was in context of processing rollfilms.

The problem isn't the plastic tank, it's the reel/suspension system. I got terrible results with the Yankee sheet film tank system, for example - tons of streaking along the lines of the support mechanism. Having been thus bitten, I gave up on daylight tanks and the various assemblies used to hold the film in place. (Though as noted below, tube processing demonstrably works as seen in the work of various online videos.) I also got bad results with the Kodak framed hangers - something I have used with great success for open tank processing using conventional development techniques.

With a lot of trial and error, I concluded that (semi)stand/EMA likes having minimal contact between the film and whatever is supporting it. That's why things like the BZTS tubes or the home-made version of them appear to work well (though I've not tried them) - there is nothing in contact with the edges or emulsion of the film.

In the end, the only thing that gave me consistently good results was using pinch style frameless hangars and hanging the sheets horizontally to maximize the distance from the bottom of the film to the bottom of the tank. I would imagine X-Ray film hanging clips would provide much the same success once one figured out how to hang them off something.

Interestingly, rollfilms on Nikor reels presented no problems so long as the reel was lifted sufficiently off the bottom of the tank. I have no explanation for this since there is reel-to-film contact along the entire length of the reel, albeit on the unexposed edges of the film.