For Rob only:
Nope, Slobodan, not right.
The tonality is all wrong for pushed film, as are the highlights. Pouring porridge onto a photograph doesn't change what's in the
negative file, only what's still visible on the reproduction.
These tricks are just that: can't fake love.
;-)
Rob
P.S.
To explain: the confusion starts with a basic misunderstanding about the nature of film and its relationship with exposure.
It's been the romantic notion of photography magazine writers to wax eloquent about raising (and rating) film to several times its stated speed. That, in my view, has caused so much confusion that those writers should be prosecuted!
1. Film has but one ASA, DIN or ISO, call it as you wish, and that's the one with which the makers gave it birth. Every exposure departure from the maker's recommendation doesn't change the film's speed, it simply means that you are choosing either to over- or underexpose that film. In some cases, this still works when you choose, intentionally, to ignore either very dark or very bright parts of a scene.
2. Underexposing and pushing (extending) development times. When you underexpose, you deny the film sufficient exposure to light to capture detail in shadow areas, to varying degrees of underexposure, depending on how dark those shadow areas you want to record actually are.
3. Extending development. This doesn't change the exposure that you gave to the film - it's no magical second-chance at changing the original exposure. All that it does is send the areas that should be highlights into a false state of being: rather than be a sliding gradation of tonality from light grey to pure white, that area of the negative is blocked up (to varying degrees) by overdevelopment and can become a solid block of white (on the print).
Meanwhile, in the shadow areas, the missing detail due to underexposure is still missing. What the overdevelopment does is increase the contrast within those tones that you
have managed to record, and that should, ideally, be smoothly-graded mid-tones, and give them a false degree of contrast which makes them look unnatural.
4. Now, take Slobodan's biker with faked grain. What you can see there is this: dark shadow areas with plenty of tonal separation, with a layer of mess applied to the
surface. If it had been genuine underexposure, those separate dark tones wouldn't be there: you'd just have a solid dark mass due to unrecorded detail.
Within the highlights, the image shows 'grain' that also gives the lie to the picture: if those had been genuine, blocked film highlights, they wouldn't show grain: they'd be pure white. To show grain you need to be able to show the spaces betwen the grain, which you just can't do if no light gets through that part of the negative and onto the paper. Hence the classical blocks of pure white in genuine film overdevelopment and/or overexposure. This often used to be aped/faked in fashion pictures, where faces would be bleached out to give a sense of high contrast/high key; also, if you look at W. Eugene S's stuff, he does exactly the same sort of highlight bleaching, even, sometimes, where no highlight would logically have existed: it's all to create an effect and to brighten up what might otherwise be a boringly flat picture.
This is certainly all old news to old snappers, but if you come directly to the subject with only digital in your life, you could never know: you have to suffer the problems and pay your dues. Digital mistakes look different.
