I decided to try a little experiment and see what would happen to a roll of Agent Shadow when it's pushed 4 stops (ISO6400).
Both days I shot the film were bright sunny days but I did have a red filter on, to try to bring out the clouds and darker the skies. I also took images in a dark environment.
As there was no development times for this kind of push, it was difficult to work out a time.
The Massive Dev Chart gives an estimated time of x1.5 for one stop to x4.5 for 3 stops. I thought about x5.5 which would giving me a develop time of around 33 minutes, which I didn't really fancy standing and agitating for that amount of time, so I went with a stand development.
For those who don't know, stand developing is a way to develop film that has an unknown history, is expired for many years or you have been playing silly buggers with it.
It helps to boost shadows and preserve highlights.
A usual development would mix the developer at 1 part to 30 parts water. Stand uses a very weak solution 1 to 100. The film was developed with BelliniFoto Euro HC110.
With this method you agitate for the first minute then stand for 1 hour.
Now I don't know if I messed up somewhere in the process but the negatives came out really thin.
They needs a lot of work to get something half decent and and even then not that great.
I had no need to push this film so far, it was just to see what the possible outcomes would be. I don't know if the stand development, over developed the film, it shouldn't of but there were a lot of variables with this whole experiment.
I think I'll probably stick with small amounts of pushing film in future, along with normal developing.