Coldberry is an isolated spot in a side valley off Teesdale, not far from Middleton-in-Teesdale, which was at its most active in the second half of the nineteenth century.
I visited on a rather bright and sunny morning and shot a mixture of Portra 160 and Ilford FP4+ in a Mamiya RZ67.
The above images, shot on Ilford FP4+, were developed in “Firstcall B&W Film Developer“. Firstcall ( a photo retailer) don’t directly give the source of this rebranded product, but the fact that the product description and developing times are identical to Rollei RHS D74-DC suggests that the two are identical. Given that the Firstcall-branded product costs £4.99 and the Rollei version costs £13.27, the choice is what they call a “no-brainer”.
This was my first try with the Firstcall developer and I have no complaints so far.
The last image was shot on Portra 160 through the door of what I took to be a farm building, but I read on the Pastscape website that is was lodgings for the miners. The contrast range was enormous and I was hampered by trying to frame the shot whilst reaching around the door and trying to avoid any danger. I took two shots with different exposures with a view to merging them, but in the event I used just one of the shots.
As you can see below, it doesn’t look very promising !
Apart from the tilt – I really must locate my missing spirit level – there is very little detail visible in the shadows. I was surprised by how much detail Lightroom was able to reveal – the exposure latitude of Portra is amazing. There is a colour version which I like but I decided to do a mono conversion for this blog post, to avoid mixing colour and mono.
kevinthephotographer 