This is another instalment in my local businesses series, where I visit somewhere interesting near where I live, take some environmental portraits, and try to come back with photographs that do the place justice. Thornbury Men’s Shed is brilliant. It is also a slightly unusual subject for the series because it is a charity rather than a business, but the spirit is the same: people doing something they care about in a place worth photographing.
I brought four cameras and a roll-call of film. I came back with a mix of triumphs, disasters, and one panoramic format experiment that needed two shoots to get right. The men of Thornbury Men’s Shed were patient enough to put up with me dragging them out into the cold twice. They deserve the article.
What Thornbury Men’s Shed is
The Men’s Shed movement started in Australia and has grown to around 700 branches in the UK alone, plus more worldwide. The idea is simple: a place where (mostly retired) men can gather, do something with their hands, talk to each other, and not be lonely. Mental health and social connection are the genuine driving concerns behind it, though nobody talks about them in those terms.
Each Shed runs slightly differently. Some are four blokes in a literal shed with some tools and a kettle. Thornbury is much bigger: a proper premises with a workshop, a shop at the front, ongoing restoration projects (including a Land Rover one of the members has been rebuilding from scratch), and donated items they fix and resell to pay the bills.
I spoke with Andy, one of the longest-standing members, who pointed out the strange economics of his retirement. Ten years ago, he was working two and a half days a week and being paid. Now he is working two days a week and paying subs for the privilege. He genuinely seems happier. Doing what you enjoy with people you like, in a place that exists because everyone who turns up wants it to, has a value that goes well beyond the wage that the day used to come with.
If you have an older relative who you think might benefit from this, look up the UK Men’s Sheds Association. There is probably one near them. Two days a week, plenty of tea, plenty of chat. It is doing something quietly important.
![PLACEHOLDER: a wide environmental shot of the Thornbury Men’s Shed workshop, showing the scale of the space and people at work]
Four cameras, one shoot
I brought:
- Bronica ETRS loaded with Kodak Tri-X 400 (pushed to 800 for the indoor work)
- Rolleiflex SLX loaded with Portra 400
- Stenopeika Air Force 4x5 with Zebra glass plates and dry plate tintypes (ISO 2)
- Kodak Brownie 2A circa 1920-1924, originally for 116 film, adapted for 120
This is too many cameras for a single afternoon. I know it is too many cameras. But you can never take too many cameras, right? The diversity of formats meant that across the day I was shooting 645, 6x6, 6x11 panoramic, and 4x5 frames in the same space, which is genuinely interesting as a way to see how the same scene wants different framing depending on what camera you have to your eye.
The Brownie 2A and the panoramic experiment
This was the technical lead-in to the whole shoot, and the one I was most excited about.
I had borrowed the Brownie from the Men’s Shed’s own box of old donated cameras. Most of these things I would normally walk past. They turn up everywhere and they look like exactly what they are, cheap pre-war box cameras. But the Brownie 2A had something most people overlook: it was built for 116 film, which is significantly wider than 120.
The film gate measured 11.5cm across, which meant that if I could load it with 120 film instead, I would get 6x11 panoramic negatives. Properly wide. Big, single-frame panoramas in a way you cannot easily do on any modern medium format camera without a dedicated panoramic body.
The conversion was simple in principle. The Brownie was built for 116 spindles, which are physically larger than 120 spindles. I had earlier made adapted 120 spindles by gluing washers onto the ends to bring them up to 116 length. Cleaned the camera, gave the shutter a once-over (tested at a steady 1/150th), cleaned the lens, dated it to roughly 1920-1924 based on its features.
What I did not do, and should have done, was a test roll.
![PLACEHOLDER: the Kodak Brownie 2A with its adapted 120 spindles, showing the size difference between the original 116 and the modern 120 film]
How that went the first time
Badly. I shot a roll at the Shed and the negatives came back with catastrophic light leaks. Not just edges or corners. Proper across-the-frame fogging, with the staging of my winding visible as bands of brightness up the side. There was something on the negatives. You could just about make out images. But they were essentially unusable.
The light was getting in through every seam in the camera body, which on a 100-year-old box-construction camera is more or less every join. I taped around every potential entry point, headed out for some test shots, and they came back fine. Brilliant. Camera fixed.
So I called Andy back, asked very nicely if the lads would mind being photographed again, and headed back down. Out the men came, into the cold again, while I set up the Brownie.
The results were better. Much better. But not great. Light leaks again, less debilitating, but clearly present along one edge of the frame.
What I worked out
After some thought, I realised what had changed between the successful test and the second Shed shoot. When I had taped the camera up after the first failure, I had also taped over the red film-counter window on the back. For the test shots, I had not bothered removing the tape on the window. For the Shed shoot, I had peeled it off so I could count frames.
The window was the leak. Light coming through that little red plastic disc was hitting the top of the negative and producing exactly the kind of edge fogging I was seeing.
I am not going back for a third attempt. The lads have suffered enough for my incompetence. The frames I got from the second shoot, light leaks and all, are good enough, and one of them (a portrait of Bob the chairman) is genuinely my favourite from the whole day. The 6x11 panoramic format suits a workshop full of people working. Wide rooms want wide frames.
If you ever try a similar 116-to-120 conversion: tape the red window. Or do not peel the tape off between tests.
The Bronica ETRS and the Tri-X push
The Bronica was the main camera for the indoor work. The Shed has good window light but not abundant light, and I wanted to keep apertures sensible rather than shooting wide open. The obvious solution: push the Tri-X 400 to 800 to give me an extra stop to play with.
This worked, in the sense that I got the exposures I wanted. The frames came back properly exposed at f5.6 instead of having to drop to f2.8.
The contrast, on the other hand, was something. Tri-X is already a high-contrast film. Pushing it makes it more so. The resulting frames have the kind of dramatic, almost graphic black-and-white look that some scenes want and some scenes do not. A busy workshop with lots of detail and varied light arguably wanted a softer film, or at least Tri-X at its native 400, to retain more shadow detail.
I would not race to push Tri-X to 800 again. But for one shoot in difficult light, it gave me what I needed, and the high-contrast frames have a moodiness that suits the subject. Compromise.
The Rolleiflex SLX with Portra
The Rolleiflex SLX got Portra 400. This was the easy roll of the day. SLX, Carl Zeiss lens, beloved colour stock, well-understood workflow.
The results were lovely. Portra handles the warm interior light at the Shed beautifully. The wood tones, the soft skin tones on the lads, the occasional bright window highlight. This was the film and camera combination that did the least work and produced the most reliable results.
I also put a roll of expired Portra 400NC through the SLX. Those frames did not make the cut. Expired colour film wants meaningful overexposure to compensate for the lost sensitivity, and the indoor light at the Shed was not generous enough to provide it. Lesson learned.
![PLACEHOLDER: a Portra 400 frame from the Rolleiflex SLX showing the warm interior tones and one of the members at work]
The 4x5 dry plate disaster
The Stenopeika Air Force 4x5 was set up for two different shoots: Zebra dry plates on glass, and Zebra dry plates on aluminium (tintypes). Both rated at ISO 2.
The aluminium tintypes were a complete disaster. The plate I shot of Andy came back with no image at all. No exposure, no developed silver, nothing. I had backups, so I tried again. Same result. I have binned both attempts and they will not feature on the channel.
The glass plates worked. I shot Bob the chairman on a glass plate at ISO 2 and got a nice image. Slight motion blur from the long exposure (his head moved a fraction during the seconds it took to expose), but a genuine portrait, on a glass plate, in a Men’s Shed. The frame is one I am proud of.
What is strange is that both products are rated at ISO 2 by Zebra and are, presumably, similar emulsions on different substrates. I shot the glass at ISO 2 and it came out very slightly overexposed. I shot the aluminium at ISO 2 and got nothing. Something is off, and I need to investigate. For now: the dry plate tintypes are probably a dead end for me. The glass plates work. I will stick with those.
The frames I am proudest of
Bob on glass plate, by some margin. The 6x11 panoramic of the workshop with the lads working, light leaks and all. The Portra group portrait outside at the end. Andy at the workbench on Tri-X, hard contrast and all the lines of his face visible.
A working photograph from each of three of the four cameras I brought, plus the failed tintypes which taught me to stop bothering with that particular medium. That is a reasonable haul from a community shoot in a single afternoon.
On the place itself
The Men’s Shed is one of those quiet, small institutions that do enormous good without making a fuss about it. Andy and Bob and Mike and Malcolm (their clock repairer, 93 years old, eyesight failing now, but who proudly restored the grandfather clock visible in the background of half my photos before it sold to a new home) are doing something that matters.
Ages range from around 55 to 93. Topics of conversation range from Land Rover restoration to mobile phone speed-test apps. There is a great deal of tea.
If you are anywhere near Thornbury and you have time on your hands, contact them. If you are anywhere else in the UK, find your local Shed. And if you have older relatives who might benefit from somewhere to be a few days a week, point them at this. It is not a hobby club. It is a quiet, important, sociable thing that helps people stay well.
Big thanks to Andy for setting up the visit and to Bob the chairman for letting me come and document the place. Sorry I made the lads stand outside in the cold twice!
Post script
About a year after I made this video, I was incredibly sad to hear that Andy had died after a short illness. He was such a friendly guy, as you saw in the video, excited and passionate about his photography and warm and welcoming whenever I saw him. I was genuinely sorry to hear the news. A loss to the world, and whilst he had clearly seen some things in his years, I don’t think anyone thinks it was quite his time yet. His family got in touch and found some comfort in being able to see him in this video I think. A truly lovely man, it was my honour to have met him.