Fan House

This is the fan house for the Number Three Mine Shaft at the Nordegg Historic Site.  The harsh summer sun was nicely showing the texture of the rivets and steel.  This fan moved air through the mine to provide fresh air for the workers, and to exhaust any buildup of explosive gases, like methane, that came off the coal face.  Despite the fact that it has not been used for 70 years, the drum fan still spins on its shaft.  There must be an intake somewhere up above on the hillside, though I have never been able to locate it.  I was photographing at the mine during a private tour, as this site is only open to the public by guided tour.

I messed up a little when I shot this.  I used a very wide lens to record this scene.  Normally when I use my really wide angle lenses with my view camera I need to make a bunch of movements on the standards of the camera.  The bed of the camera needs to be dropped, the rear standard needs to be tilted back, and the front standard needs to be raised and tilted back towards the film.  The bellows extension for wide lenses is minimal and the front standard ends up pushed right back towards the film plane.  These movements are necessary to prevent getting the bed of the camera into the bottom edge of the field of view.  In this case I only raised the standards and didn't do the bed and standard tilts.  As a result the out of focus bed of the camera is visible at the bottom of this image.  I cropped most of it out of this scan, but a little bit of it is still visible, if you look for it.  Live and learn... I should have known better as I have made this mistake multiple times before.

This is a sheet of 4" x 5" Kodak T-Max 100 from the batch that I developed in 510 Pyro on December 19th.  The film was rated at 80 iso and developed at 1:100 dilution, for 8:00 minutes, at 24C.

I took this photograph on July 26th of 2025, at about 3:30 in the afternoon.  I used my Ebony SV45Ti view camera and a Nikkor-SW 65mm lens.  This focal length is approximately equal to a 21mm lens on a full frame digital camera, or a 35mm SLR.  I added a #25 Red Filter to increase contrast, and create some separation between sky and clouds.

The exposure was for 1 second at F20.0.