Pulling Catlabs X Film 80

My first test shots with Catlabs film were on a miserable and overcast day. This
next batch of test shots were taken on one of the brightest days we've had so far this year. The light conditions were at the higher end of EV13, pushing close to EV14. This was a great opportunity to try pulling the film to 50 ISO, so I loaded up the early model Ful-Vue and went out shooting.

If you search pushing/pulling film online you'll find far more results for pushing film. There are some firmer guidelines around pushing, whereas pulling is more of a dark art. After much searching I found a forum where a contributor stated for every stop pulled you should subtract 10% from the development time. After more searching I found another forum and someone else stating it should be 20%.

I decided to settle in the middle at 15%. Pulling from ISO 80 to 50 is only 2/3 of a stop, so I needed to reduce my development time by 10% (15% for whole stops, divided by 3 = 5% for 1/3 of a stop, and 5% x 2 =10% for the 2/3 of a stop). The standard development time for Catlabs rated at 80 ISO in HC110 developer is 8:45 minutes. Maths is not my strong point, whereas my husband finds sums on this level entirely trivial. So, on the off chance you struggle with this sort of thing too, I've asked him to explain how to work out the reduced development time here:

...Nicky explains with simple words
So having worked out that we need to reduce time by 10% we do some trifling simple maths and say that 8:45 becomes about 7:50. Bosh. Done. Pint time. What do you mean you want the details... Oh, fine, here they are.

100% of time is 8:45, now that's all well and good but we need it in decimal form to do maths, so divide the seconds by 60 to get decimal minutes: 45/60 = 0.75 minutes. Add the 8 back on and voila, 8.75 minutes.
Ok, now to reduce by 10%: 100% - 10% = 90% (yeah, that is easy, but now for the part surprisingly few people get) % means percent, which means divide by 100. So lets divide 90 by 100 and hey ho, its 0.9. Now for the next bit that trips people up: Multiply the 8.75 by 0.9 and we get 7.875. What has magically happened here is we have used multiplication to carry out a subtraction. Boom, minds blown, yeah, I know.
Righty, now we have a useless decimal number of minutes because our timer works in minutes and seconds. So we need to know how many seconds to set it for. Just do the decimal conversion backwards. Subtract off the 7 whole minutes part to leave the 0.875 minutes part. Multiply that by 60 seconds and get 52.5 seconds. Now this is a fiddly number of seconds so we will call it 50 seconds. Add the 7 whole minutes back on to get 7:50. Right, now is it pint time? No? What do you mean I cheated you out of 2.5 seconds... No one cares about those, this is an analogue process and most analogue things are normally within a tolerance of ±50%. Plus it'll take far longer than that to pour the chemicals in and out. Anyway, pint time.


Thank you Nicky. Since then Nicky made this handy calculator to do the maths bit for you.

So, I developed the film for 7:50 minutes. Here are the results. Although conditions were very bright, they were also very hazy, so I tried to focus on close-ups and keep the sky and far distance out of the photos. Where that wasn't possible I used a yellow filter to cut through some of the haze.

Bad Hair Day. Taken with the lens pulled out for close-ups. This creates a strong vignette.

Old Chimney.

Fence Post - Again taken with the lens pulled out, creating a strong vignette

Tree. Taken with a yellow filter.

Lisa Jane.

Gate

Shore Path. Taken with a yellow filter.

Staggered Fences. Taken with a yellow filter.

Ruins

Garden Shed (also featuring cameo of Tree). Taken with a yellow filter.

Friendly Horse. Taken with lens pulled out.

Old Bench.

I'm really happy with the results. The film works well pulled to ISO 50. I'm also delighted with how the Ful-Vue performed. Looking forward to more experimenting with Catlabs film.