Advice as to whether to 'pull' a film slightly during dev?

Freester

Freester

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Mark
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Hi there,

I did a studio shoot at nightschool tonight. It was a high key setup and basically we took readings with an exposure meter to shoot at ISO100, f/5.6, 1/125s.

Most people were shooting digital and from what I could see the exposure looked correct.

I had Ilford FP4+ ISO125 film and shot with the same manual exposure settings on the advice of my tutor. So I guess I will have slightly overexposed my shots...

Do I need to pull the development time to compensate?

If so I have another question - I only shot half the roll. Should I overexpose the rest of my shots by 1/3rd of a stop if shooting using the camera meter for the rest of the film?

Thanks in advance,

Mark F
 
I don't think 1/3rd of a stop will really make that much difference will it? Film is supposed to be a bit more forgiving than digital in that sense.
 
The FP4 should cope with up to about 1/2 stop without pull-processing, and as it was a high key setup then a few blown highlights will hardly matter.

It depends to a degree on how the metering was carried out - assuming that it was an incident reading then you should have correctly exposed midtones anyway.

Of course, if you will be pulling then apply appropriate compensation to the rest of the roll to be on the safe side.
 
Cheers all for taking the time to reply.

The light meter reading was an incidental reading. I guessed that the small ISO difference 100-125 shouldn't matter too much and I think I will just develop as normal if I finish the roll off this weekend.

I might wait until next week in the studio to finish the roll. If I do then I think I might pull the dev slightly.

Thanks all!
 
I used to do this in college, the light meter was always set to 125iso for people using fp4 film and my digital slr was set at 100iso. You film will be alright but their won't quite be that depth of tones that you'll be looking for. If it was me I would personally have re-set the meter and go a reading just for you, but thats me!! :)
 
Pull-processing won't hurt, In fact I'd argue it's a good thing. But it will depend on which developer you use too. It also depends on how bright the background and other highlights were. Sadly, that's not something that an incident reading will tell you.
If you do underdevelop then you can always print at a higher grade.
 
I wouldnt think a 1/3 of a stop would matter. 2 stops does start to get annoying though. We had a small class trip the other week and had two lots of film. HP5 400 and FP5 125. A girl in the group mixed the films up. So we shot everything for 400 iso and over developed the films.

So we had 1/2 the negatives slightly over developed (contrast boost) and 1/2 developed just about right.
 
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