Company Store

This is a scan of a 4" x 5" sheet of T-Max 100, rated at 80 iso and given Normal development in 510 Pyro.  Development was at 1:100, for 8:00 minutes, at 24C.

This is another of my shots from up at the Nordegg Historic Mine Site.  I continue my project to document the buildings and artifacts that remain at this site, with the permission of the County.  The mine closed 70 years ago, in 1955. 

This is the interior of the company store, the oldest building on the site.  It survived the big fire in the early 1950's that saw many of the other buildings destroyed and reconstructed.  The miners had to provide all their own tools and supplies.  Being such a remote location, they had no choice but to buy from the company store, and the cost was deducted from their paycheque.  I have no idea how fair the mine was in their pricing but one would hope they had to be somewhat reasonable about it, if they wanted to retain their workforce.  But historically most mines were notoriously cheap, so it seems doubtful that the miners were treated overly well.

I shot this on August 26th of 2024, at about 2:30 in the afternoon.  I used my Ebony SV45TE view camera and a Fujinon 125mm lens.  The exposure was for 60 seconds at F20.0.  I chose to use the pyro developer for this shot as I knew that the resulting stain would help to retain highlight value in the windows.