Pushing or pulling

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payasam

a.k.a. Mukul Dube
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A member had asked, in a thread which has vanished, about pushing or pulling B&W films in order to get an effective rating of ISO 200.

May and Baker used to make a developer called Promicrol, which had almost cult status and which gave increased speed with no appreciable increase in grain. It stopped being made in the 1980s, and opinion is divided about the developer now being sold under the same name despite being chemically different.

An alternative with similar characteristics -- fine grain and higher speed -- is Ilford's Microphen, based on the agent phenidone.

A valuable source of information is http://www.silverprint.co.uk/.
 
payasam said:
A member had asked, in a thread which has vanished, about pushing or pulling B&W films in order to get an effective rating of ISO 200.
Click to expand...

Thanks, that was me.

I was wondering whether it was better to pull ISO 400 1 stop, or to push ISO 100 one stop. Pushing seems to be more common.

I was interested mostly in resolution, then acutance and tonality...

colin
 
Colin, here is some pure speculation. Assuming that slower films are designed to give finer grain, tampering with their development is not likely to alter their "native" grain characteristics so much that grain reaches the levels which are native to faster films. As a first step, I'd suggest that you try one roll of Ilford 125 in Microphen, rated at 200. FP4 used to work for me this way in the 1970s.
 
As you say Champion Promicrol made a bit of a comeback a few years ago. Sadly Champion stopped producing any photo chemistry at all. This was the reason for the disappearance of Paterson developers if I remember the press stories correctly. Paterson Aculux claims to give enough of a speed increase to use box speeds comfortably. There is as you say Microphen. DD-X has a very similar speed kick to it.

As I said before to Colin's enquiry, I find it better to pull fast films to EI200 as this controls contrast better than pushing ISO100 emulsions. Tri-x or HP5 @EI200 are lovely with finer grain and smooth midtones. Here's Tri-x EI 200 shot against harsh winter sunlight. I can't remember whether I used HC110 at dil b or h for this. Leica M2, tabbed Summicron 50 for the record.
 

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For a 400ISO film, you dont need to do anything; its effective ISO rating is about 200ISO with normal development. 400ISO is the nominal ISO rating.

Cheers,
javabean.
 
400ISO is the nominal rating, but its effective ISO is not 200, That's EI. And it's dependent on taste and developer. There is no set EI for any film for anyone.

Probably the _best_ developer would be XTOL, which is phenidone/ascorbic acide based, and probably the most modern developer out there. Microphen with more acutance, but not too much grain.

allan
 
It achieved, as I said, a sort of cult standing. The one thing we had to watch out for was over-development: that made the negatives too contrasty and dense to handle. I wonder why May and Baker didn't keep making it in small quantities. It never could have been a money-spinner.
 
Hmmm. Well the way to actually find out is to experiment I guess 🙂

I'll waste a roll of HP5+ and FP4+ (lots of identical shots) and develop pairs of snippets in the various developers I have.

microphen, DD-X, Rodinal 🙂 , some SPUR stuff. I also have Diafine - which I haven't started yet 🙂

So far I've only used DD-X and recently Rodinal.

colin
 
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It will help if each roll has shots of both contrasty subjects and soft ones. Interspersing them for all the developers you propose to try will be tedious work, though. Of course you'll need to keep track of which bit got which soup.
 
For Colinh, I responded to your 'vanished' thread. I said, that if it was for me, I would not push 100 film but pull 400. What I want is shadow detail, and I'm afraid you just lose too much shadow detail by pushing. Here is on image taken with TriX at ISO 250. This is almost the way I like it:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/carter3john/626288064/

And giving up a little more than a stop, here is Tmax100 at box speed. This one is the way I like it:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/carter3john/997939582/
 
Thanks charjohncarter, and everyone else. I'm clearly going to have to try these all out. I should have expected half the people would say push, and the other half pull 🙂

colin
 
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