Haytor, Dartmoor

Another day spent up on Dartmoor on my recent vacation to Devon, saw me at Haytor, or Haytor Rocks to be exact. As usual for this trip I had my Hasselblad 501cm with me, the 80mm Zeiss CFi lens on and a roll of Ilford Pan-F plus in. By this point in my trip I’d already got into the flow of the set up, unlike the awkward start, trying to load that first roll for ages!

Pan-F is a “fussy” film to use. It likes accurate exposure, but we should all be doing that anyway right 🙂 ! It also likes to be developed promptly, and looses some of the latent image if you don’t. Small percentages, but sometimes noticeable, unlike say FP4. It also doesn’t keep too well, and unlike just about all other B/W films, a roll 5 years out of date may well not be OK! This was the penultimate roll of my pack of 10, and I think I’ve just about got the hang of it now. It’s slow of course, so anything than the brightest day, you’ll need a tripod. The Hasselblad kind of needs one anyway.

I’ve also got the developing timing to what I like for D23 too. The more I’ve researched and tried over the years, but especially recent moths, the more I have found that published times (for any developer) are not much more than a rough guide, and that one has to experiment a bit to get results that work well, and give the results that you like. I think I’m at that point with Pan-F/D23 now. I’m maintaining highlight detail, but also shadow detail. It’s one of those “oh that’s a good roll” when it comes out of the tank moments!

On this particular day there was blue sky, sunshine, but also lots of cloud, and quickly became overcast. It did mean though that there was “stuff in the sky” too, rather than plain blue!

To finish perhaps two of the photo’s I like the most from my entire trip….