BP 9.1 Beer Parlour Project - Return Visit to the Victoria

On the weekend of February 3rd 2024, Chris and Connie travelled up to Edmonton, crashed at our place, and we went on another outing for the Beer Parlour Project.  On Saturday February 3rd we made a return visit to the Victoria Hotel in Bruderheim.  This one will be officially referenced as BP 9.1.

I dropped off some prints that I had made from the negatives taken on our previous visit, in late 2023.

This time around we had arranged for a couple of locals, that weren't available last time, to be present.  We were able to interview and photograph them on this return visit.  My friends Arturo and Steve from the Monochrome Guild joined us on this outing, and we had a great time.

Willy is an elderly gentleman that lives in the area and frequents to the hotel on a regular basis.  He was pretty soft spoken and withdrawn, but we did manage to interview him and get a few little bits of information.  I also took this portrait of him with my Ebony view camera and a Nikkor 210mm lens.  I used Kodak T-Max 400 film, and pushed it to 1600iso.  Development was in T-Max developer, 1:4, for 8:20 minutes at 24C.  I took this at about 3:30 in the afternoon and there was some nice light spilling in an adjacent north facing window.  As a result the exposure was F11.0 for 1/8 second.

The second shot is of Hazel.  She still lives in town as well, and for many years worked as a waitress in the bar.  She worked for the former owners of the establishment and is not really associated with Al and Liza, the current owners.  I used the same camera, lens and film for the second portrait and it was taken about half and hour later.  By that point the winter light had started to drop off so I had to open up the lens by half a stop.

The final shot was staged using some old ALCB glasses that we brought along.  The owners Liza and Al graciously filled these with draft for us, on the house.  Back in the day the Alberta Liquor Control Board issued these glasses to all the licensed establishments in the province.  Similar glasses were used in other provinces.  The draft beer was filled to the line on the glass.  I believe that these contained about seven fluid ounces.  I understand that way back when, the beer sold for 10 cents a glass.  Later, by the time I became of legal age, it was up to about 25 cents.  A far cry from todays average of about 8 bucks for a 20 ounce glass.  Although today's draft beer is much better, and not nearly as watery.  For the shot of the glasses, I did not need to concern myself with subject movement.  So I stopped that 210mm lens way down to F51.0 to hold depth of field.  This resulted in an exposure of 40 seconds.  The camera, film and lens were the same as was used for the portraits, but this was taken much later in the evening, at about 7:45PM, under artificial light.