Pushing T-Max 400 3 Stops (ISO 3200)

Christina was nice enough to buy me all of the necessities for processing black and white film at home for Valentine’s Day. Immediately, I found myself wanting to experiment. I had a couple rolls of T-Max 400 and a desire to find out how well the film can be pushed. After some searches online, I wasn’t able to find any examples of the film being pushed more than 2 stops. I assumed that there were two possible reasons for this. Firstly, others had tried this already and found the result so terrible they didn’t take the time to show them to anyone else. Secondly, no one else was silly enough to attempt abusing T-Max like this. Both reasons still feel possible, but luckily for you and myself, I am silly enough to abuse film just to see what happens.

The following weekend, I took photos during a trip Aage and I took to the coast and then around the house when we returned. Below are some of the resulting images. As you will see, it appears that the grain becomes dramatically large and because of this there is a general lack of crisp detail, but not all sharpness is lost. Secondly, because the film is being pushed so far beyond its normal ability to capture light and form a strong exposure, there is a great deal of contrast between the light and dark parts in some of the images that do not have consistent lighting across the frame. This could be handy if a certain look is being sought that normally requires some fooling around with light to achieve, otherwise, it is a very unforgiving drawback to pushing the film this far. There are a number of images that were rendered unusable because of lightly shadowed faces.