Ilford HP5+ is a ninety-year-old¹ black-and-white film known for its versatility, sharpness, and controlled response to various development methods. Many photographers love to push-process it and occasionally pull-process. Yet, to my knowledge, no one has pushed it to this extreme; thus, this may be the first time anyone has ever shared the technique and the results with the HP5+ shot as if it’s an ISO 100,000 film.
As you can see, the results aren’t as clean as when this film is developed normally. I call them usable as I’ve seen worse, but you may disagree. In either case, the image is there. This article is a follow-up to yesterday’s experiment with pulling HP5+ to ISO 3; whereas the former was fairly easy to do, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend you try what I’m about to share with you here. Still, this resource comes with all the techniques and recipes necessary to replicate the experiment, as well as suggested times for developing HP5+ at EI 12800, 25600, and 51200.
What does it mean to push film, and how is it usually done?
In my previous article, I covered this topic in some detail. Plus, there’s a dedicated guide that answers this question. In brief: while there’s a suggested ideal film speed, we can change it by altering development times, temperatures, and chemical dilutions. For example, Ilford HP5+ is an ISO 400 film, yet it can be metered for as if it were an ISO 200 or an ISO 800 film and developed accordingly to yield correct exposures.
As you would imagine, there are limits to how much we can push (develop film to simulate higher ISO values) and pull film. At a certain point, the film produces all sorts of artifacts, one of which is a larger grain or, worse, no image at all. In this article, I’m pushing HP5+ further than anyone has ever done or at least performed successfully and documented online.
Why would anyone shoot HP5+ as an ISO 100,000 film?
Increasing film sensitivity to such extremes can help the photographer get an image in a darker environment. Needing less light also means higher shutter speeds and smaller apertures could be used.
For example, the photo at the top of this article features a crow that has just pushed itself off a table; it shows no motion blur (as it was shot with 1/4000s shutter speed) and no depth blur (everything’s in focus, including the table that’s about 1m/3’ from the camera and the light post that’s about 10m/33’ away — this was shot at 𝒇16).
