If you Google my full name, you’ll find articles, like “This is the First Photograph to Ever Be Developed With Weed,” the existence of which is owed to the incredible versatility of the Ilford HP5+ film and the three friends who helped that experiment come to life.
Another world’s first was when I pushed HP5+, an ISO 400 film, to behave like an ISO 100,000 film (+8 stops of push processing). And no one, to my knowledge, had before shot it at EI 3 — which I also tried, succeeded, and published on this blog.
Whatever I threw at HP5+, it handled it like a champ. Sure, it would take some work to get this film to perform unusual tasks, but when it comes to being a reliable partner in creating black-and-white images, there may be no stock better than this. Whether you’re a pro, an experimental photographer, or maybe this is the first film you’ll ever shoot — HP5+ just works.
The original review of HP5+ was published three years ago, before the experiments and countless rolls I spent trying to understand the emulsion better. Today’s update is a complete rewrite of the original article, which incorporates all of the above:
Not only does this re-review include the usual basics, like the grain, contrast, home development, scannability, prices, etc., but it has an updated section that disambiguates the Ilford name (which is just one of *four* names under which this film was sold). I’ve researched and covered the history of this film more thoroughly — and I’ve rescanned my 2018 negatives to offer you photos taken with this film when I was a little worse at photography (but thanks to this film’s forgiving qualities, still look pretty decent today).
Please enjoy the review, remember that you can download and print it as a very pretty PDF, and let me know if you have any experience with this film you’d like to share!
Dmitri