Beer Parlour Project 6.0

On Saturday August 5th Chris, Connie, Margarit and I headed out for another edition of the Beer Parlour Project.  This was the sixth location of the project, so therefore it became BP 6.0.  Our friends Arturo and Sharon, although not officially part of the project, joined us for this one and also took some photographs.

We visited the Thorsby Hotel and Bar.  We had stopped here on a scouting trip a month prior, and introduced ourselves to the manager, Vivek.  We later found out that he had only been managing the place for about three months so far.  He has done a really good job, and the place has a great social media presence.  Vivek had a musician playing the night we were there, and had made advance announcements about our visit.  The turnout was really good, and the place was packed.  It seems some people came out to see the musician, Dwayne Harrish, and the rest had come to see what the collection of uber-nerd photographers were trying to document.

It was a lot of fun.  Vivek lives in Edmonton with his family, but also has a suite in the hotel.  His wife works in the kitchen, and his daughter was hanging around in the pub in the early part of the evening.  They serve some excellent East Indian food.

Like most of the other taverns we have visited, the light levels were very low.  It was extremely challenging to try to photograph anything with a big view camera.  The fastest film available is 400 iso, and with additional development and a marginal loss of quality, some of these films can be pushed two stops.

I haven't developed the T-Max 400 film yet.... this is the one that I pushed to 1600 iso.  But I did develop a few sheets of Ilford HP5, rated at 320 iso and processed in 510 Pyro developer.  I experimented with a technique, and I think it might work in some situations.  I triple exposed the film, with the 3 exposures adding up to the correct amount.  This allowed for a little faster shutter speed on each of the three exposures....1/2 and 1/4 second in the two examples below.  Of course in a busy tavern environment, the subjects were moving around between the three exposures, and this provided a sort of ghostly, jerky image.  I think this might be alright in some instances.  

The other technique was to just go with the long exposure, and let the subject blur.  That's what I did with the shot of the musician, and the shutter speed for that one was 1/2 second.

The cafe is adjacent to the tavern and Arturo noticed how nicely the evening light was pouring in the windows.  The exposure for this was was 1/30th of a second.

Arturo had the where with all to pose Margarit in the cafe and got a great shot of her, as a lone patron nursing a drink.  It turned out much better than mine....

All of these shots were taken between 6:00 and 7:00 on that summer evening.  All were shot with a 150mm lens, with the exception of the cafe shot, which was taken with a wider 90mm lens.

I'm generally happy with the way these turned out, but am kind of anxious to see what the pushed Kodak T-Max 400 film will yield as there will be less motion blur in those.  There is certainly a steep learning curve to shooting with a view camera on film in a tavern environment.  It is totally different from anything I have ever shot before.