It’s been a while since we posted any personal work on here, so we thought what better way to show some of Christian’s work than to share some of our recent results with pushing film in the lab. We are planning a more in-depth guide to pushing film at some point in the near future, but one thing that’s important to the success of pushing film is some form of light source on your subject: ‘low light does not mean no light’, and pushing film is not going to help you out if there is no luminance to your subject. Pushing film increases contrast and in doing so, you lose shadow detail….pushing film generally helps your highlights more than your shadows, so that’s something to bear in mind. Of course, pushing film does not always have to be something you do only out of necessity because of low light – you might choose to push film for the artistic effect. Something to bear in mind with the latter is that when pushing colour negative, the process starts to alter the colours and it can be difficult to attain the natural look that you will be used to with normally developed C41 – pushed film is always going to look different, but perhaps that difference is what you’re wanting to achieve. With careful choice of light and exposure, however, it is possible to achieve good results.

So this weekend, Erica put down her camera and took up her modelling duties for Christian who was behind the lens. We recently shot some Fuji Reala and loved the colours, so we thought this would be a good time to try something for artistic effect – pushing Reala. As Reala is a 100 speed film we rated it at 800 and consequently pushed it 3 stops in development. In terms of black and white, we shot TRI-X at both 3200 and 6400 (and pushed 3 and 4 stops respectively). There is also a shot taken with Neopan 400 (not pushed) for comparison. And for instant film lovers, you’ll find some FP3000B in there too!

Contax, TRI-X at 6400/pushed 4 stops

Neopan 400, Leica M6, Zeiss Sonnar 50mm at f/1.5

Contax/TRI-X at 3200/pushed 3 stops

Contax/TRI-X at 6400/pushed 4 stops

Contax/TRI-X at 3200/pushed 3 stops

Contax/TRI-X at 3200/pushed 3 stops

Contax/TRI-X at 3200/pushed 3 stops

Contax/TRI-X at 6400/pushed 4 stops

Contax/TRI-X at 3200/pushed 3 stops

Contax/TRI-X at 6400/pushed 4 stops

Contax/TRI-X at 3200/pushed 3 stops

Polaroid 600SE/Fuji FP3000B

Polaroid 600SE/Fuji FP3000B