Pulling ... not pushing!

[Keith]

With Neopan 1600 hitting the skids there's been a bit of discussion lately about pushing 400 black and white film a couple of stops to achieve a similar result and a lot of the information given in these threads has been invaluable for those who want to go this way.

What about the other side of the equation ... pulling a fast film back a couple of stops? I tried this for the first time the other day just out of curiosity to see what would happen. I used Legacy Pro 400 (neopan) and exposed it at 100 ISO and developed it in straight Xtol for six minutes giving it a bit more agitation than I normally would if developing it at it's correct speed. In hindsight six minutes was a bit more than it needed because it looked a little overdone but even so I liked the look. It was shot in our usual bright contrasty Aussie light where it can be very easy to get blown highlights when using 400 film conventionally.

Are there any regular 'pullers' here and if so how about sharing your technique and showing us some results. 😀

And thankyou to my ever enthusiastic subject ... 'Jaffa' the goat. 🙂

 

[Rhodes]

Wooo, talk about the devil! Should it she be a goa'ould insted of a jaffa? Nice photo, once I pull a tmz at 400 (forgot to change iso setting) asked for help here and after developed with dd-x, it come out quite good.
Now I have a similar case of a legacy pro 400 at 64, but didn't yet finished the rol.

 

[sevo]

It once was common - read up on the zone system, original AA version. But we're really past that, modern film will cope with a 7+EV contrast range in the linear area of their curve at nominal development, and will get worse once you tweak the latter.

In the old times, when some of your content always was in the non-linear part of the curve, shifting the upper (underdevelopment) or lower (overdevelopment) knee was the price you had to pay to capture a given range at all. But nowadays you better leave development at the optimum point by range, expose for the most critical detail (using only the better founded half of the zone system) and trust the film to capture the rest...

If you want to get into advanced contrast manipulation of film, read up on flashing (diffuse pre-exposure). Most photographers haven't even heard of it, but every cinematographer has, as it is state of the art in the motion picture industry.

 

[Freakscene]

Almost everything here: http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/freakscene/ is shot on ISO400 film shot at less than Ei400. I figure this makes sense seeing as my meters are not ISO calibrated (12% reflectance) they are the usual 18% calibrated. I've checked. Technically this probably means it's not 'pulled' but anyway...

A small amount of of it is shot at the ISO speed (including Delta 3200 and TMZ at ~1000):

Very little of it is pushed:

Marty

 

[Mablo]

I pull regularly. It's a good way to tame the harsh, contrasty daylight in the summer. I normally use APX 100 and expose it at 50 or even at 25 in such conditions. I use incident metering where I can. I cut approximately one third away from my 'normal' development time. I get much better skies and clouds for example.

 

[jawarden]

Hi Keith,

This is Plus-X pulled to ISO64. I know, a photo of nothing. 😉 Earlier in the year I was experimenting with pushing and pulling and this was one of the occasions when I just walked around the house clicking, just to see what happens. Looking over my files it seems I do this a lot!

Overall I'm more of a pusher; usually I bump Tri-X to 800 so I can hand hold, and sometimes I take it to 1600 but that's more rare.

Plus-X on a sunny day is a nice thing.

Jeff