I went to the Banff Centre to try out developing paper negatives in the field. Equipped with a Polaroid 450 camera, a dark box, paper, and chemicals, I drove to the Banff Centre and decided to park in the parkade under the music centre. But as I got out and looked around I realized that I was far removed from the national park, even though I was in the middle of it. So I loaded the camera with paper in the dark box and took my first picture of the entrance. After loading the paper into the developing drum and pouring in developer, stop bath, and fixer, I pulled out the first negative and was both excited and a little disappointed. The field developing process worked great, but the scene had way too much dynamic range, so the entrance was blown out and there was no detail inside. But I was still excited to see the negative right away. It was almost like taking a Polaroid picture except instead of "pictures in a minute," it was "negatives in 3 minutes."
So I tried to compose scenes without as much dynamic range and was pleased with the results. I tried a couple of self portraits, where I'd open the shutter and run into the picture for a couple of minutes. The first one worked, but the second one was backlit, so part of my back went missing in the result! During that time in Banff, I never left the parkade. I lingered, pondering this place, thinking about how our society created the need to build it.