In 1992, a landscape picture, Oaks and Clouds, Morgan Territory Road, Contra Costa County, 1987, by Nicholas Pavlov, who worked in San Francisco, leapt off the page of the now defunct American Camera and Darkroom magazine for me. It resonated with my own feeling for local land, even to its square composition. I read the accompanying article, and the resonance rang truer and louder. "I like landscapes that have an edge", he said. His pictures that made such a connection with me certainly had an edge, and a bright tonality, very unlike that I had seen in modern prints - from tabular grain films for instance, or even the thin emulsion films that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. I read on. Nicholas talked of his technical approach. The Hasselblad camera he used fitted with the square images on the page, and the film he used? Verichrome Pan.

What snapshooters' Verichrome Pan? Box camera Verichrome Pan? Yes, that very film with its old fashioned thick two-layer emulsion long scale tonality which made these pictures look so rich. But what about sharpness. Surely it would be less sharp than more recent thin emulsion films. Well, not according to these prints.

I hurried to my local Leeds and KJP distributors to get some. No joy. They hadn't seen it for years. They got out Kodak's professional catalogue - not shown there either. I got in touch with Kodak UK. No, it was no longer available. Not even on special order? No, not even on special order. Frustrated I gave up, and went on using Ilford HP5 Plus. It not only performed just as well as ever in dilute Perceptol, but, now that I was researching tanning and staining developers leading to the evolution of DiXactol™ developer, it was a joy to find that it gave the best tanning and staining of all modern films too. Verichrome faded into the background - a sometime, never item on the wish list, but that thick emulsion look lived on in my mind and I frequently flicked the pages back to the Pavlov landscapes.

Those who don't know of the great May sale held by Britain's photographic collectors' club in the Royal Horticultural Hall in London are missing out. It's a huge treasure trove of hardware new and ancient (and of knowledge and appreciation) at reasonable - haggled - prices. Wandering around there in 1998, I had picked up several small gems at bargain prices, like my American Magnasight enlarging focus finder for £5. Then I saw a camera that was totally new to me (and I have seen most!) - a Sawyers 4x4 TLR. Like a baby Rollei TLR, this petite Japanese-made black camera had a better spec. Its Tokyo Optical company F2.8 lens focussing down to 2 feet told me it was made by Topcon. It had fully automatic lever wind with easy load. I love the 4x4 square format on 127 film, and indeed had a baby TLR back in the 1960s, when I used Verichrome as well as tranny film in it.. I was lost. An over-the-top £80 left my wallet for the mystery Sawyers.

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