The critique that made me stop overdeveloping my black and white film

I used to push every roll of Tri-X a stop or two because I thought grainier meant more artistic. Then a guy at my local camera shop in Columbus looked at a print I brought in and said, “your highlights are blown because you're compensating for shadows you never even needed.” He handed me a test strip and showed me how my base fog was creeping up from all that extended development. I switched to a straight D-76 process at 68 degrees for the box time, no agitation tricks, no heroic timing. The negatives came out flatter but the prints had way more detail in the midtones, which I didn't even realize I was losing. Now I only push if I actually shot below box speed, which is rare since I carry a meter now. Has anyone else had a reality check like that from a stranger's offhand comment?

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hannahsingh2d ago

Whoa wait, he just said that to you out of nowhere? Like he looked at your print and just dropped that line about your highlights and base fog... That's wild. I've had people critique my stuff at shops before but it was always like "nice tones" or "maybe crop this a bit", never that deep into my actual development process. And he was just right about it too, that's the scary part. I pushed a roll of HP5 last month and I swear I lost all my shadow detail trying to make it look moody, and now I'm wondering if I should just go back to plain old D-76 and stop trying to be clever with my timing. Your story honestly makes me want to redo my whole workflow from scratch.