My go to black and white film has always been ILFORD HP5 PLUS for its excellent versatility, I love the grain I get especially when pushing it. When I look at black and white images I find that I am drawn to the ones that have deep blacks and bright whites.
I am not knocking ILFORD Delta 3200 Professional as I have only ever shot 3 rolls of it in my life but I have never managed to achieve the results that other photographers have with that film, I always seem to get very muddy and grainy images with it.
But when I push HP5 PLUS to 3200 I get to shoot in low light and get the look that I want nice deep blacks with good contrast and grain that is far more pleasing to my eye.
I have tried pushing this in various developers but my best results have been with ILFOTEC HC 1+15 dilution for 11 minutes.
The images featured were with my Nikon F100 & Nikkor AF-D 50mm f/1.4 at a local Railway open day except the portrait which was kindly posed buy my better half in our kitchen.
~ Tim
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I tried it at 1600 and looks amazing, I’m gonna try at 3200 soon, images in this article look great!
HP5 is my go-to film as well, especially when pushing it. I used to use Delta 400, but I find it doesn’t push as nicely as HP5. And I feel the same about Delta 3200, any time I have used that film my images came out muddy and overly grainy, which makes the negatives difficult to work with in the darkroom. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on one of my favourite films!