A Grand Day Out

So last weekend I ventured to the Annual Ballymoney Agricultural Show and what a great day it was.  I was well armed with a ton of 35mm film for the rangefinder and 120 film for the Hasselblad as well.  In the end I just shot with the 'Blad - it seemed like the right tool for the occasion, for some reason, although changing films in the middle of a field surrounded by sheep and farming paraphernalia was a bit tricky - the first time, anyway.  I shot 4 films that day - a whopping 48 exposures and that was a lot for me with the Hasselblad.  But I couldn't resist, as everywhere I looked there seemed to be a shot worth taking.

This was the first or maybe second shot of the day and set the tone for the rest.  Almost no-one seemed to mind having a camera pointed at them - in fact, most seemed to be delighted.  They were in their finest clothes, you see.  Plus their animals were in tip-top condition and they were proud to be showing them off - and rightly so, as preparation for showing starts a few months beforehand, so I was informed.   All the washing, clipping, pampering so that on the day they would catch the eye of the judges.

Ballymoney Agricultural Show, 2019.  HP5+, Adox MCC paper

Just for the record, I was rating HP5+ at 250iso and metering with the little Sekonic 308 (which fits nicely in the top pocket of a shirt, by the way).  Developed in my usual ID-11 1+1 for 13 minutes and printed on Adox MCC fibre paper in Fotospeed WT-10 developer at roughly 1+20 dilution.  I was reading somewhere that the Adox developer works well with this paper so I might get some to see if the rumours are indeed correct.