If you know anything about film photography, then you may have heard of the terms ‘pushing’ and ‘pulling’ film. But what do these terms mean and how do they help film shooters? Well, it’s quite simple. Film photography is all about experimentation, and these techniques gave photographers more control over the look of their images as well as more versatility in their shooting, long before the advent of digital with changeable ISOs and editing in Lightroom.

As you will know, each type of film has a fixed ISO set by the manufacturer. But what if the conditions are darker than is suitable for the film type you have? Well in that case you could push the ISO to a higher one e.g. shooting an ISO 200 roll of film to ISO 400. To compensate you then develop it longer to in theory reach the same amount of exposure. This is very handy, especially when you want to shoot at ISOs 800 and above, where there are little to no film stocks available at such a high native sensitivity. Pushing the film stock also gives darker shadows (as less information was captured there) and therefore more contrast. Developing times are key here, you are not just underexposing in camera.

Pulling is the opposite and done less often, shooting a film at a lower ISO and then developing it for less time e.g. shooting an ISO 200 film at ISO 100. If the conditions were too bright for the lens and film speed combination then you could choose to do this but typically it’s done for creating images with less contrast. Black and white film stocks are the ones pushed and pulled the most as they are easy to home develop and this gives you more control. Labs can push and pull film for you but they normally charge extra. As few people develop their own colour film it’s rarer to see them pushed and pulled, but people do absolutely do it.

And so I too wanted to experiment further with this for the first time. I started out with pulling a roll of Ilford HP5+ from ISO 400 to ISO 200 as that is what I had at the time. Thankfully I had the perfect opportunity to shoot a roll in my Kodak Retina iiiS with a trip to 2022’s Silverstone Classic. Nothing like capturing classic cars on an equally classic camera and with its small size it easily fit into my bag along with all my digital gear.

So, what did I think of the results? HP5+ is known as a gritty and grainy film with a medium amount of contrast. Having exposed it to more light I can definitely see a decrease in contrast over shooting it normally and, whilst there’s still a very obvious grain, it does look less pronounced than when shot at its native ISO 400. The film can’t completely overcome its native origins though, and it still looks very much like HP5+. Though the odd photo, like the one of the white Mini in the pits, does look more like it was shot on ISO 125 FP4+.

It's worth bearing in mind that I was shooting on a very simple camera with a limited light meter and only able to change the shutter speeds in whole stop integers. This may have meant that my exposures were not perfect which could explain why some images are cleaner or grainer than others. But that really doesn’t matter when shooting like this and this first attempt was a big success in my eyes. Though I don’t see many reasons why I would pull film stocks to a lower ISO on a regular basis as there are so many low ISO films available.

Keep an eye out for next week’s blog when I attempt to do the opposite. Pushing a roll of Ilford FP4+ to ISO 200. Will the results be similar? You’ll just have to wait a week to find out.

You can read my original blog on the Silverstone Classic 2022 by clicking here.

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