Shot and Push-Processed Ilford HP5 at 12800 - results

[peanutbutter&jelly]

Hey all,

I'm new to this forum, and my experience push-processing a roll of HP5 to what I think was 12,800 got me curious as to if I really did develop the image at 12,800 or if there's something else to it. I'm still a beginner to the whole dev process.

As background: when I shot the roll, I used a light meter and set it to 6400 ISO (since that was the highest it went), and then I moved shutter speed or aperture one stop over to compensate for 12800, and from there I took pictures accordingly. When I got home, the only developer I had was D-76, and so I guesstimated dev times based on an exponential chart I drew out.

What I came to was that at 68F, dev time for 12800 on a roll of HP5 was about 27:30 with initial 30 seconds then 10 second agitation every minute. So I did that, and my pictures came out surprisingly well. Everything below had very little to no touching up on Photoshop's Levels. Was this just beginner's luck? Not using this as self promo but more to understand if saying what ISO you shot at is purely arbitrary or not. Check it out:

 

[summicron1]

i strongly suspect -- just guessing here -- that your actual film speed was not that high, but you sure got something and that's all that matters. There are limits, mostly as the developer get's used up, but HP5 is also very forgiving.

Do it again, see if it is reproducable. You never know.

 

[pentaxuser]

Hey all,
As background: when I shot the roll, I used a light meter and set it to 6400 ISO (since that was the highest it went), and then I moved shutter speed or aperture one stop over to compensate for 12800, and from there I took pictures accordingly.

They look pretty good. Another poster seems to have questioned whether your speed was in fact 12,800. I can only surmise that this may be due to your use of the word "over" . For clarity do you mean that after getting the right exposure for 6400 you went to a higher shutter speed ie. if the shutter speed for 6400 was 1/30th then you moved to 1/60th( underexpose) as opposed to 1/15th(overexpose) compared to what the meter said?

Thanks

pentaxuser

 

[peanutbutter&jelly]

They look pretty good. Another poster seems to have questioned whether your speed was in fact 12,800. I can only surmise that this may be due to your use of the word "over" . For clarity do you mean that after getting the right exposure for 6400 you went to a higher shutter speed ie. if the shutter speed for 6400 was 1/30th then you moved to 1/60th( underexpose) as opposed to 1/15th(overexpose) compared to what the meter said?

Thanks

pentaxuser

Thanks for asking to clarify. I meant the former. So if the shutter speed for 6400 was 1/30th, I moved it to 1/60th. Which leads me to believe that this is indeed 12,800.

 

[Eric Rose]

Give it a try with a Rodinal equivalent developer with semi stand development. What you got looks pretty impressive so far.

 

[pentaxuser]

Thanks for asking to clarify. I meant the former. So if the shutter speed for 6400 was 1/30th, I moved it to 1/60th. Which leads me to believe that this is indeed 12,800.

Thanks and I'd agree. Maybe this has clarified it for the poster in question as well. The meter may of course be wrong but otherwise in the absence of any evidence I cannot work out how the poster can suspect strongly that your speed was lower. He may now tell us what he believes the evidence to be for this belief

pentaxuser

 

[peanutbutter&jelly]

Give it a try with a Rodinal equivalent developer with semi stand development. What you got looks pretty impressive so far.

Just looked into Rodinal (I've been using D-76 for the last couple of months) and it looks awesome! Will give it a try for some variety!

 

[MattKing]

It is important to understand that push processing doesn't really increase the light sensitivity of the film (much).
What it does do is increase the contrast of that part of the scene where there was enough light to cause at least some image to be formed.
A push development attempting to achieve an Exposure Index of 12,800 is a five stop push.
Your results are fairly useful because there are enough highlights in your subjects which can survive five stops of under-exposure, once the resulting murky low contrast is boosted back to near normal with the increased development.
The shadows and low mid-tones in the scene can't survive that much under-exposure - that is normal.

 

[Lachlan Young]

Real world, you were probably closer to an EI of 1600 than 12800 - those subjects might well fall closer to an EV of 4-5 in actuality.

 

[pentaxuser]

Real world, you were probably closer to an EI of 1600 than 12800 - those subjects might well fall closer to an EV of 4-5 in actuality.

Lachlan, I am unsure what you mean in terms of how this affects what the OP did with his meter when he set it to 6,400 and then halved the meter's exposure so it was as if he had set his meter to 12,800. Your quote seems to explain why the other poster said the real speed was lower. Can you expand on the above

Thanks

pentaxuser

 

[faberryman]

It doesn't look like pushing HP5+ to 12,800 is that great an idea. I can't remember ever encountering a low light setting that would require it, especially for those indoor music venue images. That's five stops from ISO 400. For indoor, 1/30th at f/2 is a common exposure. Your light reading was 1 sec at f/2 or something? Or was this just an experiment?

 

[Lachlan Young]

Lachlan, I am unsure what you mean in terms of how this affects what the OP did with his meter when he set it to 6,400 and then halved the meter's exposure so it was as if he had set his meter to 12,800. Your quote seems to explain why the other poster said the real speed was lower. Can you expand on the above

Thanks

pentaxuser

Take a look here:
http://www.fredparker.com/ultexp1.htm#Light Intensity Chart

Working from known EV's is often a pretty accurate way to estimate light - and then compare what the table states with the lighting in the images. As an aside, the whole reason why Kubrick used those T0.7 lenses for Barry Lyndon was because he was trying to get an EV of 4 (candle light) to work on Kodak 5254 (100T, could be pushed a stop at maximum) - and none of the images above are under anything darker than what the EV table defines as representing an EV of 4 - at least for reproduction of the scene as your eye would 'perceive' it - & in those specific lighting situations, the shadows are normally quite dark.

 

[peanutbutter&jelly]

It doesn't look like pushing HP5+ to 12,800 is that great an idea. I can't remember ever encountering a low light setting that would require it, especially for those indoor music venue images. That's five stops from ISO 400. For indoor, 1/30th at f/2 is a common exposure. Your light reading was 1 sec at f/2 or something? Or was this just an experiment?

I also did some outdoor shots that were most definitely not 1,600. I shot them just as I did before, by setting light meter to 6,400 and making shutter speed one stop faster to compensate. See here:

 

[pentaxuser]

Thanks Lachlan. It would appear that from the EV tables in Lachan's link, the pictures taken by the OP were around say EV 4-5. However to work out what the means in terms of correct aperture and speed we need to know what his shutter speed and aperture was. So at EV4 the tables gives a range of speeds for various apertures which result in correct exposure for an ISO of 100. Once we know the shutter speed and aperture we can then work forward in stops, 100,200 400 etc and arrive at what film speed his shutter speed and aperture corresponds to in order to see how close it was to ISO1600.

I may be wrong but throughout the thread I think we have only spoken of theoretical examples of speeds and nowhere is there actual speeds and apertures

So, OP can you give us your shutter speeds and apertures for the shots you took.

Thanks

pentaxuser

 

[Roi]

Hey all,

I'm new to this forum, and my experience push-processing a roll of HP5 to what I think was 12,800 got me curious as to if I really did develop the image at 12,800 or if there's something else to it. I'm still a beginner to the whole dev process.

As background: when I shot the roll, I used a light meter and set it to 6400 ISO (since that was the highest it went), and then I moved shutter speed or aperture one stop over to compensate for 12800, and from there I took pictures accordingly. When I got home, the only developer I had was D-76, and so I guesstimated dev times based on an exponential chart I drew out.

What I came to was that at 68F, dev time for 12800 on a roll of HP5 was about 27:30 with initial 30 seconds then 10 second agitation every minute. So I did that, and my pictures came out surprisingly well. Everything below had very little to no touching up on Photoshop's Levels. Was this just beginner's luck? Not using this as self promo but more to understand if saying what ISO you shot at is purely arbitrary or not. Check it out:

Hey I'm a newbie at developing as well. I have a 120 roll of hp4 pushed to 6400. Wondering if you could help me out with dev times?

 

[Andrew O'Neill]

I find that hard to believe. Hard to believe that you would have that much shadow info at that suspected EI. Phil Davis did a test back in the 90's, and even though HP5 is great for pushing, it suffered greatly for shadow detail past EI 1600.

 

[Agulliver]

I don't find it that hard to believe. I've quite frequently shot HP5+ metering at 6400ISO and had similar results, especially to the second set of photos. I have indeed also tried 12,800 with something like 25 minutes development time and it does work - albeit my results did have higher contrast. But I imagine some clever printing or digital editing would help the negatives produce good images. I used ID-11 and Microphen on different occasions, the usual inversions every 60 seconds.

 

[pentaxuser]

We may never know the truth as the OP was last seen on Photrio only 4 days after his last post which was 1 Jun 2018. Did he just tire of us and decide that there was no point in supplying more information or would answering my last question I asked of him have revealed to us that he had made a mistake which was what he concluded but found this was too much for him to admit?

As I said above, we may never know. So two pities 1. We lost him as a member after as little as 7 days for reasons that we do not know and 2. we are no further advanced in our collective knowledge

pentaxuser

 

[grain elevator]

Most of the scenes are mostly very dark. If you meter such as scene with a reflective meter, the lots of dark areas make you expose more. An EV(100) 4 scene could end up being exposed as EV(100) 6 or 7, making it effectively EI 3200 or 1600.

 

[pentaxuser]

I have just watched the video by someone called Kyle McDougall on over and under exposing HP5+ and from that I saw it would seem possible to do what the OP said he was doing and produce similar shots - probably

To an extent the OP "got away" with what he did in that his shots were night scenes with some very bright parts. Yes 12,800 is at least a stop and probably 2 stops too far and I wouldn't attempt to do that speed but I think there is little doubt that it can be done

Here's the video if anyone wants to have a look

pentaxuser

 

[markjwyatt]

Maybe by the time you need ISO 12800, digital starts to make some sense?

 

[removedacct1]

While you did indeed get results, I look at those photos and can't help thinking how much better they'd have been if the film had received two stops more exposure.

About Rodinal: of all the possible developer choices out there, it delivers the least shadow detail compared to almost anything else. In other words, its not optimal for pushing film beyond its normal capabilities. But hey, people like to recommend "stand development" for its Unicorn-like magical properties, capable of fixing all manner of exposure abuses/errors. (It doesn't)

 

[Helge]

Preflash and possibly latensification would help quite a bit here.

 

[Ulophot]

Whatever your EI was, it appears that you maintained remarkably fine grain for the extended development you gave. Rodinal will tend to increase the size of the grain, perhaps very significantly, compared with what you're getting from D-76. That may or may not be what you wish. Give it a try.

 

[awty]

Hey I'm a newbie at developing as well. I have a 120 roll of hp4 pushed to 6400. Wondering if you could help me out with dev times?

Would depend on Developer, I would typically use straight microphen at 20C for 20 minutes.