I recently shot a roll of HP5 film photos through my Nikon F100. I shot the roll at ISO 320, which is my normal approach to shooting ISO 400 film. However, I also requested a push of one stop from the lab (Photovision) because I tend to like a lot of contrast in my imagery.
HP5 Film Photos | Thoughts on Outcome
It turns out that exposing for the shadows on HP5 is sufficient to produce nice contrast, as the push in processing created some loss of both highlight and shadow detail. Push processing makes the brights a little brighter and the darks a little darker, thus it can be very useful for film that tends to need a little more contrast, or very rolls that were shot in relatively flat light. I wasn’t extremely pleased with this roll of HP5, even though I’ve loved the majority of my previous HP5 film photos, so I will plan to shoot at ISO 320, metered for the shadows without a push in processing, in the future.
HP5 Film Photos | Thoughts on the Keepers
Out of 36 frames on this roll, I kept 33 and am showing 15. It’s quite common that I’ll keep more images than I show, usually because the ‘keep, but not show’ images capture a moment that is personally significant, but not technically or emotionally valuable enough to show. For this case, the show number is quite small due to exposure issues, some caused by mistakes in camera, others by the push process. Keeping it honest, here- we all keep learning!
