When I started out with Zone System photography 20 years ago, and then moved up to large format over 15 years ago, I experimented with a lot of different films. After all these years I am beginning to discover which are my favorites. It's taken a long time to learn the characteristics of all these different emulsions as I was working with at least a dozen of them. It took even longer to test them in different developers and gain an understanding of what I liked. Now I've discovered, mostly be accident, that many of my best images, that have yielded my best exhibition prints, were taken on three or four of the films. One of the best has been Kodak Tri-X processed in Pyro staining developer..., Gordon Hutchings PMK formula to be specific. I think I will focus on this as one of my standard film/developer combinations. There are two or three others that have worked really well for me too. The rest, I will give up on as I deplete my current inventory. That said, I have a large freezer full of film and paper, and have overflowed that into a second one. So it will be a while before I run out of stock. In fact, I probably have enough film in stock to keep me shooting until I'm too old to carry my big cameras. Here are a handful of images shot on Tri-X, processed in PMK, that I just developed a couple of days ago. I really like a couple of these and as fall is nearly upon us, it won't be long before I have time to get into the darkroom and get serious about printing again...
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