Last October, when Virginie and Bastien first moved to Vancouver, they were temporarily situated in a little place that was just a stone's throw away from our shop. Despite moving away from the neighborhood, their friendship with Le Marché St. George continued, and eventually lead to this new event series: the VNB pop-up photo booth and darkroom. After a successful trial at this year's Make It! fair, they decided to try their setup on our lawn. With Pascal being from Quebec, and Virginie and Bastien hailing from France, Bastille Day was the perfect occasion to kick off what will hopefully be one of many collaborations between us.

Virginie described what they were doing as a twist on calotype photography, the idea being to expose the shot onto a paper negative, and contact print it to get the positive image; in the end patrons receive two shots, the positive version as well as the negative version, which they will frame for customers. This works in such a way that people could also shoot portraits of themselves after the focus has been set up. With the portrait option, people would snap their images and come back around 15 minutes later to pick up their shot, or if people chose the workshop option, they would go into the darkroom and process their shot.

A special thanks goes out to Melissa, our new cook in the kitchen who whips up delicious sandwiches and other treats, for volunteering to be the first participant of the day.

You can catch round two of VNB's photo booth at Marché this coming Saturday, July 21st, 2012.