Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Push processing

When I ordered my photo chemicals from Freestyle, I threw in a few rolls of their house brand Arista Premium film. It comes in ASA 100 & 400, and I chose 400. Rumor has it the film is really re-branded Tri-X, but I don't have enough experience with film to verify this. The reason to try it out is that it's only $2 a roll, while Tri-X is $3.75 or so.



I do know that people love Tri-X because it's very "pushable," meaning you can underexpose by a couple of stops, then develop it longer to make up the difference. The result? You can shoot your 400 film at ASA 1600. The difference in developing times is about 3-1/2 minutes.



Being new to the film developing game, I had never actually tried this, and I assumed the grain would be plentiful and possibly annoying. Boy was I ever pleasantly surprised!



Good enough for me.
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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousJuly 26, 2009 at 5:46 AM

    Hello,

    I've just found your blog as I was "googling" for some experience at pushing Tri-x, possibly in caffenol.

    I've started to use B/W films very recently and I love it. I'm developing Tri-x in Caffenol, and the results looks very nice to me. So far I've been exposing Tri-x at 400 isos, and I would like to try to push it at 1600 isos.

    But, in case it would be not such a nice outcome with caffenol, may I ask you how you did develop your Tri-x pushed at 1600 isos ? What chemistry did you use ? for how long ? The samples you've put here look really appealling.

    thanks. Philippe

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  2. emptyspacesJuly 26, 2009 at 1:13 PM

    Hi, Philippe -

    I used Kodak D76 developer, 1:1 dilution for 13 minutes. Water as a stop bath, then 5 minutes in Kodak fixer. Then about 1 minute in Arista Flo rinse aid.

    If you haven't already found it, check out the Massive Dev Chart at Digitaltruth Photo: it's a great resource for developing times if you start playing around with different films.

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