Questions on pushing/pulling 35mm film

Ok...big time NOOB question here.

Over Xmas I shot a roll of film that had been in my 35mm camera for awhile...
FULL manual camera, ISO settings do nothing for settings on the camera itself...I have to meter and set everything myself.

So, I guess the last time I'd changed film, I'd forgotten to reset the ISO indicator in the camera and well...the camera had been laying around awhile before taking it home Xmas.

I metered and shot almost everything on this roll of film at ISO 400.

When I rewound the film and took it out....I noticed the actual ISO was 100 !!

This film is color film....Kodak Ektar 100.

So, if I understand things correctly....Since I shot this 100 speed film at 400 (metered).....I need to request to "Push" this film by 2x stops...

Is this correct?

Is the vernacular that if you shoot a film faster than it is rated, you are pushing it...and if shooting slower than rated, you are pulling it in development?

When pushing film....you are extending the time it is in the developer?

And lastly...my local place I take my film to be developed only pushes/pulls black and white film....so I'll need to send this off somewhere in the US I guess to get this done.

Does anyone have a good lab to send to?

I've heard about "The Darkroom" lab and their price sheet looks reasonable....it seems a lot of places I've found for some reason only want to do prints and not send back uncut negatives....

I'd rather scan my negatives myself....


Anyway, thanks in advance for what I know are extremely noob level questions.

cayenne

Yes, you UNDER-exposed the film by two- f-stops, so it needs to be over-developed (PUSHED) in an attempt to compensate. This is easier in B&W. In color, you can end up with color-shifts. Not every place will do this, but others may have some suggestions.

If, in the end, the color shifts are too horrible, you can always make B&W prints out of the negatives.

Yes, this is a two-stop push.

First, disclaimer: I shoot mostly B&W nowadays. Color has a lot more exposure latitude, though I think it prefers overexposure to underexposure (which you did). (This latitude is why pushing/pulling is less common with color.) Sometimes you can shoot color negative film at the wrong speed, process it normally and still get usable results. As for whether to get your film push-processed or develop it normally -- I'll leave that advice to other who know better and just talk a bit about pushing/pulling.

Pushing the film is underexposing and over-developing. Pulling is overexposing and underdeveloping.

Here's my layperson's understanding of how it works: Exposing silver halide to light causes some of it to convert to metallic silver (the dark bits on your negative). Development pretty much continues this process, with the crystals that got more light exposure getting converted (reduced) more. So if you don't give the film enough light, you can compensate by giving the developer more time to continue this process. (As I understand it, if you exposed film long enough, you could forgo developer altogether and plop it right into the fixer, the chemical that removes the un-converted silver halide.)

My go-to for low-light photography is 400-speed B&W with the camera set to 1600. It's two stops underexposed, so I extend development time to compensate. Results are (hopefully) good negative density, but more grain and contrast than I'd get if the film were shot with the camera set to 400. Here's an example of HP5 at 1600.

Pushing/pulling w/ B&W is easy. Every B&W has slightly different development times (which varies with any of the zillion developers you can use), so pushing/pulling is easy to do, just develop longer. Most films/developers have a chart showing development time at different ASA settings.

Color negative film is meant to be a standardized process, called C-41. Pop it into the machine and it's all automated. Hence the difficulty with pushing/pulling; I don't know if they change the speed of the machine or change the temperature of the developer, but it's an out-of-the-norm process, so labs charge more.

As I said, color neg film has a lot of latitude (tolerance for improper exposure). Ektar a bit less than some general-use films, perhaps, since it's meant to be pro-level stuff. C41 film was meant for use in, among other things, cheap cameras with fixed exposure settings, so it's designed to return usable results with less-than-optimal exposure. It's really amazing technology and hats off to Kodak and Fuji et al for how well it works.

Your best bet might be to call Darkroom or another lab that does pushing/pulling of color film, tell them what you did and ask them. Yours is not an uncommon mistake; they've probably seen it a zillion times before and will know whether you need to push-process or develop normally. As Xkeas mentioned, pushing/pulling can affect colors, so you might be OK with slightly thin negatives that have good color.

The good news is: This is a mistake one rarely repeats!

HTH
Aaron

PS, technically this is a 35mm equipment thread -- you might get better/more comprehensive answers on the Color: Film, Paper and Chemistry forum. I'm fairly new here so not sure what the policy is on moving posts.

Autonerd said:

I don't know if they change the speed of the machine or change the temperature of the developer,

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The last place I had film processed where I could talk to a live person face to face would do all pushes at the end of the shift, so they could turn up the temperature enough to push +1, run all the +1 films, turn up the temperature a bit more for +2, run the +2 films, then warm up to +3 if needed and run the +3 films -- and then set the machine temperature back to normal before closing up for the night so it'd be back to normal by the time they opened in the morning. From my understanding, this is much easier to do with minilab processors than changing the film movement speed.

For my own home C-41, the two times I've pushed, I added time -- because that's less effort than raising my tempering bath above 100F. A dip-and-dunk lab will likely do it this way, because it's easier and less disruptive to change the color developer time than the temperature with a large system like that (several hundred gallons of developer vs. a gallon or two in a minilab).

I don't recommend The Darkroom after they have messed up my film too many times.

I do recommend NorthCoastPhoto, and they push/pull color film

Donald Qualls said:

From my understanding, this is much easier to do with minilab processors than changing the film movement speed.

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Yes, that is the only way it can be done on most minilab processing machines, as the drive motor is set to a constant speed. You only need to increase the developer tank temperature BUT always remember to set it back to 38C.

Huss said:

I don't recommend The Darkroom after they have messed up my film too many times.

I do recommend NorthCoastPhoto, and they push/pull color film

Film Processing and Scanning

Processing and Scanning Film from around the world. 35mm, 120mm, and Sheet film processing, C41, Black and White, and E6 color positive film. Located in Carlsbad, California.

northcoastphoto.com

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Ok thank you!! I"ll give them a look.

Anyone else here have problems with "The Darkroom" and developing of their film?

TIA,

cayenne

I've only sent out one roll of film since I started doing my own C-41 in 2007. It was to The Darkroom, in 2019, and as far as I could tell, it was fine. Their standard scans weren't exceptional, but they weren't bad, and I was planning to rescan them myself anyway. The roll was 68 mm frames over the sprockets (exposed in an RB67), and they followed instructions not to cut the negatives. Not sure what else I could ask for. If they're screwing stuff up now, they may have had significant turnover during the pandemic and/or be short staffed (hence overworked).