Made the Peak District on Sunday morning. Up at 4:30, on location by about 6 – 45 mins before dawn. It was a pretty misty start up by the Cat & Fiddle. Headed down towards the Goyt Valley and popped the ol’ wellies on to do some stuff in a stream. Got some interesting shots in there, and managed to keep my feet dry! Well dry-ish. On inserting my left foot into the first boot, I discovered that it still had rain in it from the previous day, as I’d left them outside after jet washing the drive. DOH!
After the stream stuff, I jumped back in the car and headed over to Macc forest. The mist had lifted by this time and the sun appeared intermittently. I donned hiking boots, grabbed tripod and set off on foot. After about 20 minutes I realised that this was a bad idea. The Billingham bag I use for film is so damned heavy and uncomfortable! I really should have emptied the LowePro rucksack before I left but I hadn’t envisaged doing much walking. So I trapsed back to the car and headed off elsewhere. Quite where I ended up, I’m not sure. It was by a small stream down the bottom of a single track road, but I got some great shots here too.
All shot with T-Max 400 and processed in T-Max developer. I used some Ilfotol this time too instead of washing up liquid as my wetting agent and there is a vast improvement in the clarity of the negs. I’m afraid that I think I’ll be ditching the Mobberley film in favour of Kodak from now on.
To date, I’ve shot primarily with Ilford Delta. I’ve used HP5 a bit, but I’ve preferred the Delta. Developed in DD-X I’ve been getting some pretty good results. That is until I tried Kodak’s new T-Max
.
Wow! The results are so much better. I shot a couple of rolls of 400 and dev’d them in DD-X and the quality of the negs are vastly better than the Delta. Very sharp and seriously fine grain. I’ve ordered some T-Max developer from Silverprint along with a job lot of film and am quite keen to see the results of T-Max dev’d in its own developer. I’m pretty gutted that they don’t yet appear to do a 3200 ISO in 120. They only seem to do it in 35mm, but allegedly it can be pushed 4 stops to 50,000 ISO. I’m quite keen to have a go with that too 
