Pushing Acros 100 to 800?

I'm doing a bit of experimenting and shot a roll of Acros 100 at 800 recently. I was wondering if you guys had any advice on how to develop the film.

I've had a decent amount of success pushing it to 200 and 400 using Ilford DD-X and D-76. I have Rodinal, Microphen, and DD-X at my disposal (I'm thinking Microphen might be best since it is speed enhancing). Any guesstimates on times?

The Microphen will get you about one stop. In fact most phenidone based developers will get you a stop. However they cannot work miracles. I have no idea how you will get the other two stops without a serious sacrifice in image quality. Is there any reason to push this film? For serious work it would be better to use an ISO 400 film then one stop is within the films latitude..

Thanks for the reply, Gerald. This isn't serious work, I'm just curious to see how it would turn out. I love shooting Acros and have pushed it and pulled it just to see how it would look. So I figured it would be interesting to shoot a roll at 800 just to experiment!

IIRC Acros is known for little or no reciprocity failure, so you might try just increasing the development time 3 stops and see if that works. I know that astrophotography guys have written about choosing Acros over faster emulsions because it doesn't need correction for long exposures (check out Tri-X's correction when the metered exposure is 10 sec or longer). Let us know what you find!

Diafine at 85F.

My post no. 7 in this old thread may give you a clue.

Karl-Gustaf

(there was a url link here which no longer exists)

It might work, I have rarely (maybe never) pushed a medium speed film three stops. I would try D-76 1+1 for twice the normal ISO 100 processing time as a starting point. Massive says 10.5 minutes for ISO 100 and 21 minutes for ISO 800 so it was a pretty darn good guess!

One very important take away from photography school was the fallacy of "pushing" negative film, since confirmed in real life.

Hi

I did some Experiments pushing various films to about 1000ASA, when I was studying Photography just to see what results I could get. I found that FP4 was the most
forgiving, from memory I developed it in D76 1+1 for approx 25 mins , I was able to print quite respectable results at 8x10. The films that did not push so well were TMax 100 AND Delta 100, I have never tried pushing Fuji 100 to 1000 so you are on your own. I found that D76 was the developer that gave the best all round image quality when pushing, and a dilution of 1+1 gave the best highlights.

The only way you are going to find out is to give it a try

Johnkpap

I experimented pushing Delta 3200 to 12,800 (2 stops) using DD-X. I was very pleased with the results. It meant I could take indoor photos at night without flash on of my Zeiss MF folders.