It's not a conscious effort, but I feel I have become something of an advocate of HP5+ film developed in Perceptol. It is a combination that Barry Thornton used to sing the praises of, and I have found myself admiring it time and again.

It's all very well doing studies of film and developer combinations in the abstract (see my Pebble Project galleries, and blog posts for lots on this), but the simple fact is, for a photographer shooting black and white, it is the tones he or she attains in practice that are key.

The properties I enjoy with this combination are sharpness (with a little grain suppression) and a long tonal range. It's the latter I've really got in mind in presenting the above image. The scene was backlit - a classic dramatic landscape type image - and it really benefits from the film's ability to capture a wide brightness range. The undulations in tone follow and amplify the structural curves of the trees.