In film photography, there’s two phases to making a photo: the exposure phase and the development phase, and in both phases of making the photo, you have some creative decisions to make that will impact the outcome of the final image. If you recall from the previous post, there are 3 parts to the exposure phase; aperture, film speed and shutter speed. These three things are known as the exposure triangle and you can manipulate each “leg” of the triangle to achieve different effects.. Likewise, film development has its own kind of exposure triangle; what type of developing chemical is being used, development temperature and development time. Like the exposure triangle, these three components of film developing can be manipulated to achieve different looks for the final image. In this post, we’ll be looking at development time - how long the exposed film sits in the developing chemicals for - specifically a technique known as “pushing” the film.
What is pushing film (aka push processing)?
Pushing the film is when the expose film is left in the developer for a longer period of time than what is recommend for a “normal” development time. Pushing the film in development is usually combined with rating the film at a higher ASA than the manufacturers recommendation during the exposure phase, however, pushing the film strictly refers to the development phase.
Effects of Pushing Film
During the developing process, the shadow areas of the scene will fully develop first, while the bright, highlight areas will continue to develop. The longer the film sits in the developer, the brighter the highlights will become. This creates more contrast in the final image. The other effect of push processing is a grainier final image. Pushing color film will increase the color saturation as well.
So why would anyone want to push their film?
It’s a stylistic choice
Some people choose to push process their film because they like the high-contrast, grainy look.
Low-er Light Shooting
As whatever environment you are shooting in begins to get darker, your shutter speeds are going to get longer to allow more light to hit the film. Eventually, your shutter speed will be long enough that taking a photo of a moving subject will be impossible to do without having a blurry subject, or you want to be able to hand-hold the camera anymore because the natural shakiness of your hands will result in blurry photos. To combat this, we can rate the film at a higher ASA e.g. take your 400 ASA film and shoot it as if it were a 1600 ASA film. Rating the film 2 stops higher will allow you to shoot at a shutter speed that’s 2 stops faster (1/15sec vs 1/60th sec) which can make the difference between being able to hand-hold your camera and not. Doing this, however, does not make the film any more sensitive to light; 400 ASA film is 400 ASA film, there’s no changing it. Rather it just underexposes the film. To compensate for the underexposure, we over-develop the film; we push process the film. Push processing doesn’t save these underexposed images and make them look like they were normally exposed. What it does, by over developing the film, is make the developer work harder on the shadow areas and squeeze every last drop of detail and texture out of them.
My Push Processing Experiment
I used Kodak’s Tri-X 400 and developed it in Kodak’s D-76 developer. The normal development time is 6 minutes and 45 seconds; pushing the film 2 stops called for a development time of 9 minutes and 30 seconds. I've shot and developed many rolls of Tri-X under normal exposure and development circumstances and get consistent results so I would have a good “control group” of images to compare against the pushed images. I rated and developed the 400 speed film at 1600. So in doing this I underexposed all the images by 2 stops and then overdeveloped them by 2 stops. I tried shooting in a variety of lighting situations from high-noon on the beach to 3AM in a dark alley.
The above gallery is the collection of pushed images, the gallery below is a collection of normally exposed and developed images for comparison. My initial impression is that I’m a huge fan of the results. I tend to like my images to be on the more contrast-y side and usually end up adding contrast to my images in post production. So it was nice to get higher contrast images right out of the camera which saved some editing time. I especially like the increase in perceived image sharpness that I wouldn’t get by processing the film normally and adding the contrast in post.
Looking at the two sets of images, you can see the normally processed images have much less contrast. There’s more detail and texture in the shadows and the highlight areas aren’t completely blown out to pure white. You can also see how much more pronounced the grain is in the pushed images than the normal ones, particularly in the sky and the shadows. The two images shot at night don’t have a huge difference in contrast but you can tell the highlight areas are much brighter in the pushed image than the normal one and you can really see the difference in the film grain. I thought the extra graininess would bother me but I actually don’t mind it. I would love to shoot Tri-X this way all time but shooting at ISO 1600 at high-noon on a cloudless day at the beach isn’t practical. All but two of my film cameras have a top shutter speed of 1/1000 which simply isn’t fast enough for that kind of shooting situation. I would have to have the aperture on the lens stopped all the way down to f/22 to keep the shutter speed at 1/1000 which takes away any creative control over the depth of field of the photo. Not all of my lenses will stop down as far as f/22 and my go-to walk-around camera tops out at a shutter speed of just 1/500. I was able to get the above shots because I was using my Maxxum 9 which tops out at a wild 1/12,000 and even then some of the shots maxed it out. As much as I’d love to carry my Maxxum 9 everyday, it’s a beast and not the best option for an everyday walk-around camera.
What are your thoughts? Can you see the difference, which do you prefer? Comment below.