Today’s 8×10 is a picture of a wooden bridge you can find at Stanley park, Vancouver. On my desire to share an 8×10 a day for a whole year this one was kinda of a choice. There is another bridge close to lost lagoon that I’ll take pictures other day, that one is way more busy though.
I had to wait for couple that were doing couple things around to get out, I guess my mere presence put them off, but well, I’m sorry folks, not my intention.
During the setting up the camera and everything, I could see a couple birds that were really interested in what I was doing. I love Stanley park, even if is plagued with vehicles and the city and park board is not helping with that, actually the opposite.
Anyways, this is the picture
Camera: Gibellini AG810
Lens: Fujifilm W 360mm f6.3
Film: Portra 160
Developer: C41
Developed at: 160 ISO
Number of interruptions of people asking about the camera: 0, I actually messed up people
Exposure time: 1s
Aperture: f22
Digitized: SilverFast 9
Post Process: Photoshop
The bridge and the park
Stanley Park is a thousand acres of forest, seawall and trails right at the edge of downtown Vancouver, and it hides a lot of small structures like this wooden footbridge that most people walk past without a second look. That is usually what I am after on the 8×10, not the postcard view but the quiet corner that rewards standing still. There is another bridge closer to Lost Lagoon that I want to shoot another day, but that one stays busy with people the whole time.
How it was made
This is a Gibellini AG810 with a Fujifilm W 360mm on Portra 160 in C41, developed at box speed. The exposure ran a full second at f/22, which is why the setup mattered more than the click. At a second, anything moving in the frame smears, so you wait for the path to clear and for the light coming through the canopy to settle. A long lens on 8×10 also means the depth of field is thin for a landscape, so f/22 is doing the work of holding the near rail and the far trees together in one plane of focus.
The heavy part of large format is not the exposure, it is everything before it. Level the camera, focus under the dark cloth on an upside down image, load a single sheet, meter, and only then trip the shutter. By the time the film is exposed you have looked at the scene longer than most people look at anything, and a quiet bridge under old trees is a good place to spend that time. The full notes are above, and the frame is in the 2023 print gallery.
The park itself is the reason these small frames exist. It is a working forest in the middle of a city, and the quiet structures in it, a footbridge, a rail, a set of stairs, hold up better on film than the busy viewpoints everyone already has on their phone. I would rather spend a sheet on the corner nobody photographs.