BP32.0 - Marengo Hotel

This shot is from the Beer Parlour Project visit to the Marengo Hotel, in Marengo Saskatchewan, back in July.  This is Kaila, the daughter of owner Penny, and Ronan, the son of Kaila.  It seemed kinda weird to see a little kid in the bar.  But, aside from being family of the owners, the bar also serves as a restaurant and a small convenience store.  They sell a few snacks and pop to the locals as there are no other services in the town.  So kids are allowed in until some point in the evening, when it switches over to just a bar.  I can't recall... around 8:00PM or something like that.

This one was somewhat of an experiment for me.  So far I have been using two large format films for my Beer Parlour Project portraits.  Those are Kodak T-Max 400 and Ilford HP5.  They both work reasonably well, but I've been investigating other options.  This shot was taken on Kodak Tri-X Pan 320, rated at 1600iso.  The development was in highly diluted Kodak HC-110 developer, 1:100.  The development time was for 2-1/2 hours, with very minimal agitation.  I just gave the film very gentle agitation for a few seconds, every 30 minutes.  I have a plastic cover that I put over the tank of developer, that had the film and stainless steel hangers in it.  This allowed me to open the door and leave the darkroom after the development had started.  I slipped back in every half hour to agitate the film.  Then after two and half hours I returned to the darkroom, left the lights off, removed the cover, and continued with the stop, fixing and clearing baths.

The idea of this extremely long development time is that the dilute developer becomes quickly exhausted in the areas where there is a lot of exposed silver (the highlights), but continues to work in the areas with little exposed silver (the shadows).  It seemed to work quite well and the eight sheets that I developed on the afternoon of August 12th all turned out reasonably well.  Once I process the duplicate shots taken at the same time, on one of the other two film types, I will be able to compare and form a more realistic opinion.