The floating gas station
This is the floating Chevron in Coal Harbour, a fuel station built on a barge for the boats that work and play out of Vancouver’s inner harbour. Instead of pulling up to a pump on a road, you pull up to it in a boat, which makes it one of the more quietly odd landmarks in the city, an ordinary service in an extraordinary setting, sitting on the water with the downtown towers behind it and seaplanes coming and going overhead.
Why photograph it at all
Most people never give it a second look, which is exactly why it caught my eye. A gas station is the most mundane subject imaginable, and putting it on 8×10 film, the slowest and most deliberate way I have to make a photograph, is a small joke that also happens to produce a good picture. The contrast between the humble subject and the serious process is the whole point. It says the thing worth photographing is not always the grand view, sometimes it is the working object nobody else bothers with.
Everything sharp, front to back
The shot data tells the story here. This was made at f/64, which is about as small as the aperture goes, and it is the setting that keeps the whole scene sharp from the near edge of the barge to the buildings across the water. There is a well known group of large format photographers who named themselves after exactly that aperture, because f/64 is shorthand for maximum depth of field and maximum sharpness, the sensible, unglamorous choice when you want everything in focus. On a scene with foreground, midground, and a distant skyline, it is the right one.
The trade at f/64
Stopping down that far costs you light, which is why the exposure ran long and why the camera has to be locked down hard on the tripod. It also asks a lot of the lens and the film, since at a tiny aperture you start fighting diffraction, so f/64 is a deliberate trade, a little overall softness from diffraction in exchange for everything being in the plane of focus. For a scene like this, where the depth is the subject, it is worth it.
A plain subject, seriously made
I shot this on black and white, developed in Rodinal, which suits the graphic, structural look of the barge and the pilings and the towers. Stripped of colour, the scene becomes about shapes and tones, the horizontal of the water, the verticals of the city, the low box of the station in between. It is a frame that takes something completely ordinary and treats it with the full weight of the process, which is most of what I am trying to do with these entries anyway.
Camera: Gibellini AG810
Lens: Fujifilm W 360
Film: Blackcats MkII
Developer: Rodinal 1+50
Developed at: 100
Number of interruptions of people asking about the camera: 1
Exposure time: 1/2
Bellows Extension Factor: 0
Aperture: f/64
Digitized: SilverFast 9
Post Process: Photoshop
The setting does a lot of the work too. Coal Harbour is one of the busiest little stretches of water in the city, with seaplanes taking off and landing, boats coming and going, and the downtown towers standing right behind it all. Dropping a plain fuel barge into the middle of that, and then photographing it as carefully as you would a landscape, is the small joke and the real point at the same time. The most ordinary object in a remarkable place, taken seriously. That is a fair description of a lot of what I end up pointing the 8×10 at.