Pan F Plus

Two today for you, from that Ballintoy place.  Using a new-to-me film, Ilford's Pan F Plus, which I was rating at 25iso rather than the box speed (50).  It's a low speed high contrast film, super sharp with fine grain according to that crowd at Mobberley in Cheshire (Harman-Ilford).  I can certainly vouch for the fine grain bit - on a 6x6 neg it was really hard to see any, using my super-duper Peak focus finder.

Ballintoy, looking towards Benbane Head.  On Foma 313 RC paper.

These were both long exposures, using (if I remember correctly) the 150mm Sonnar with a big 10 stop filter.  Well, long-ish - about 8 seconds or so.  The filter is a pita, truth be told, as I have to compose and focus without it, then meter, calculate 10 stops under and then remember to attach the damn filter before locking the mirror up and triggering the shutter via cable release (assuming I remembered to order one online since I keep losing them...) while counting one-elephant, two-elephant or however you wish to estimate the seconds.  Anyway, here's t'other one:

More of the same

Like the print of S you saw the other day (here), the contrast could do with winding down a tad and some more of the detail in the rock formations would then be visible - there's plenty showing in the neg. The negs look great, incidentally - I think this is a film I could get to like. Ilford recommend developing Pan F as soon as possible after shooting it, by the way, or risk degradation of the image.

If you don't click on the images to see them full screen then just move along, nothing more to see here.

If, on the other hand, your curiosity has got the better of you, click 'em and zoom in.  I'll give you a few seconds to do that...

See the problem?  Lots of them, aren't there?  Looks like a minor snowstorm, those white dots all over the show.  Truth be told, I hadn't even noticed them on the prints, it was only after scanning them I saw them.  But they are there on the prints too.  Dust?  Nah, couldn't be that much dust on both negs, surely.  Dust on the enlarger lens possibly but I do blow front and back elements the odd time and I doubt it would all over the print like it is here.  Anyway I checked the negatives on a light box and yup, there are a lot of black spots just faintly visible with a loupe.  

I think it's a developer issue and even more annoying I seem to recall having a similar problem not so long ago.  I'm was using the last bottle of ID-11 stock from the 5l batch I made a couple of months ago and I think there has either been some settlement or some of the grains of the developer weren't fully dissolved.  Either way the whole film suffers from the black spots.  So I'm a little pee'd off that it's happened again. I think my love affair with ID-11 might be coming to an end.  Not ID-11 per se, more developers that come in powdered form.  Typically I've only just taken delivery of another 5l pack of the stuff but I might hold back making it up and just keep it on the shelf (in powder form) for now - along with a memo to filter the damn solution before use. What I do have on the shelf is a litre of Kodak HC-110 that I bought a while back and I think I'll experiment with that for a while.  It comes in liquid form - nice!  Dilution B is 1:31 so although a 1-litre bottle is about £40 it’s so heavily diluted that cost-wise HC-110 would actually work out a little cheaper than ID-11. And...without the hassle of making it up from powder (and more importantly, no more black spots on me negs).  Let's see what the results are like.  I'll have to run a few films through and do a little testing first but that's OK.  I shall report back via the usual channels (i.e., this place).