Adox Adonal (Rodinal) and Ilford Delta 100

As I mentioned, I've been interested in trying out Rodinal for awhile now. From what I hear, it's a good developer to use for fine-grained films to get better sharpness at the cost of having more noticeable grain. I guess the idea is that if you have fine enough grain to start with, you can afford to spend a little of it on sharpness.

Well I had some 35mm Delta 100 on hand (I try to keep that stuff on hand since I like it so much), and decided it would be the first victim today. I took it out to a big commercial garden near my home and burned through it pretty quick. I wasn't aiming at creating art since the sun was basically right overhead and there wasn't tons of shade. I just wanted to have a roll to soup in Rodinal when I got back.

I guess a little explanation of the title of this post is in order. Rodinal is a super old developer that they've been using since like the Civil War or something. For a really long time, the company Agfa (now belly-up, unfortunately) was making it and selling it. Then they went out of business, things got complicated legally, and basically other people started making stuff that was virtually the same thing. You can now get it under a few different names if you look. As near as I can tell, the two most popular are Adox Adonal (claims to be the exact formula that Agfa used for Rodinal), and something called R09 One-Shot. I just went with Adonal. No real reason why.

Anyway, I got home and unfortunately had to go to work before I could soup the roll. While at work, during my downtime, I did some research on the effects of different dilutions, as well as checking out some of the results other people were getting with this combo on FilmDev. Honestly, I wasn't super impressed with what I saw on FilmDev for this combo. In the process I learned a few things.

a) Apparently higher dilutions give higher contrast but less shadow detail, and more noticeable grain.
b) With Rodinal, agitation is perhaps more influential than with any other developer. More agitation = less grain, less sharpness, more contrast, and more risk of blowing out highlights. Less agitation, even to the point of stand or semi-stand developing (recommended by lots of people) will control highlights really well and separate out the tonality within the denser parts of the negative.
c) Rodinal tends to lower effective film speed in high dilutions.

After reading all this, I settled on starting things off at 1:50 dilution, a good middle ground. I got my developing time from The Massive Dev Chart and got down to business.

Here I agitated a lot less than I do with HC-110. With HC-110, I pretty much always give it 30 seconds of agitation at the beginning, and then 5 seconds for every 30 seconds of developing time throughout. After reading what I did about Rodinal though, and especially considering my negatives were already doomed to be really contrasty because of the light I was shooting in, I did 30 seconds of agitation at the beginning, and then 5 seconds for every 2 minutes after that.

And the results are in.

The whole "highlight controlling" thing is no myth.This was smack in the middle of the sun, literally about noon. Those flowers were light yellow or white, if I remember correctly. DEFINITELY kept the contrast down here.

The additional grain is also no myth. From what I saw on FilmDev, and what I read, Rodinal doesn't play nicely with Delta's grain. This is nowhere near as smooth and silky as I'm used to Delta 100 being. I don't see any obvious huge jump in sharpness between HC-110 and Rodinal with this film until I zoom into 100%, where it becomes a little more evident. But I was frankly satisfied with the sharpness on Delta 100 + HC-110. It's not worth the extra grain to me.

I had also read that using high dilutions of Rodinal (like 1:50 rather than 1:25) can rob you of film speed, which as I understand it, effectively means you lose exposure. I wonder if giving this more time in the soup would have given me better exposures here. I also wonder if it was just error at time of shooting though, because a) 14 minutes in the developer is nothing to sneeze at, and b) I was not metering; just shooting at Sunny 16 and guesstimating exposures whenever I needed to deviate. So that was probably stupid to leave so many variables running wild in the testing. Regardless, this seems dark to me, and this is one of the better samples from the group.

The top shot looks okay, but the bottom one and the majority of the shots I didn't upload were lacking in contrast. This is odd, since apparently higher dilutions should give higher contrast.

So yeah. I'm feeling the grain isn't really what I'm looking for here. I want to revisit this pairing since I obviously haven't done extensive testing yet. But I think the next test I do with this film and developer will be with 6x7 format, souped at 1:25 dilution, and perhaps agitated a bit more. The larger format should help with the graininess, the dilution should also help with the graininess, and the extra agitation should give me more contrast. Just need to be sure to shoot in open shade, which is what I'm inclined to do with Delta 100 anyway, based off my previous tests.

I'll give the combo points for REALLY controlling the highlights in what could otherwise have been completely unusable images though. I would guess that has more to do with Rodinal + anything than it does with Rodinal + Delta specifically.

But yeah. Unless something goes miraculously well in my medium format tests with this combo, I probably won't be souping 35mm Delta 100 in Rodinal anymore. Maybe it will give me better results with a classic grain film like FP4 or PanF rather than a T-grain (or Ilford equivalent) like Delta though. Long story short, I still have lots of testing to do to find out where Rodinal fits in my arsenal.