beth_hunt•9d agoMost Upvoted

Overheard a guy at the lab saying push processing is a scam, had to rethink my whole workflow

I was dropping off a roll of Portra 400 at the photo lab in Portland last Saturday and this older dude in line was telling the clerk that pushing film is just a waste of money, that you might as well shoot digital if you need speed. He said he shot a wedding in 1993 at 1600 ISO and the grain ruined every shot he cared about. It got me thinking about how I always push my HP5 to 800 or 1600 for shows and dark bars without really testing what that does to my shadows. So this week I shot the same street scene at box speed, 800, and 1600 on three rolls, same lens, same f-stop roughly. The push gave me thinner negatives and way more contrast, but honestly the 800 was fine and I only needed the 1600 for one dim alley shot. Has anyone else run a side by side push test and actually liked the results, or do you just do it out of habit like me?

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noah_palmer427d ago

Man, that lab guy sounds like the kind of person who brings a tripod to a birthday party and calls it "proper technique." I did a similar test years ago with Tri-X and found out I was basically paying extra to make my pictures look like a photocopy of a photocopy. The grain at 1600 wasn't "artistic," it was just ugly, like sandpaper made out of bad decisions. Honestly, the only thing I push now is my luck with expired film, and even then I keep it to one stop. That dim alley shot you mentioned, you probably could have just leaned on a wall and shot at box speed with a slower shutter. Or, you know, actually looked at the scene instead of assuming you needed supernatural film powers.