Pushing Film

There’s a lot of confusion about how to “push” film. What people mean by that is how to make a slower film act like a faster film.

For example back in my day hockey arenas especially in small towns weren’t very well lit. Even shooting black and white Tri-X at its recommend ASA 400 wouldn’t allow for a fast enough shutter speed even with fast lenses opened all the way up to stop the action of hockey games.

The standard lens for indoor hockey was something around 100 mm and an f/2.8 or so. I was shooting Nikon back then using a 105mm f/2.5 and to get a decently well lit image I needed to push the Tri-X 400 film to 1600 or in some cases even 3200.

We did this by using different developers and different developing times and less shaking the film while in the developer (to lessen grain). And yes at 1,600 the resulting negatives were a lot more grainy that if they had been snot at 400 but remember this was black and white and so long as you didn’t make too large a print the image in the newspaper was pretty good. If mom and dad could recognize their kid then all was well.

Now in some really old arenas we had to push Tri-X to ASA 3,200 and oh boy was it grainy no matter how little we agitated the film in the developer. But again we did get an image and it was printable.

Now it is possible to send your black and white or colour film to a lab if you’re not doing your own processing. But you have to give them instructions to push the film a stop or two depending on how you’ve shot it. You will want to talk with the lab tech to make sure they can do this as any miscommunications at this point can be disastrous.

I’ve never pushed colour film so here’s a link to an excellent page from “The Darkroom” which explains the how’s and why’s pretty well.