A Sunday at Tim Hortons is not the same room as a weekday. Three days earlier this same Tim Hortons out in the GTA was full of people working, laptops open along the window tables and men doing paperwork under the old price list. On Sunday every one of them was gone. The room had filled up with the people who come because it is Sunday afternoon and this is where they go. I was there for twenty-five minutes on the last day of May, 2:27 to 2:52 by the camera’s clock, and I came home with six frames I wanted to keep.
Under the Old Price List
The first frame of the afternoon is a woman in black at a table against that same yellow 1964 mural, the cup tipped all the way back, getting the last of it. Cinnamon, fruit, chocolate eclair on the wall over her shoulder and a giant drawing of a mixer aimed straight at her head! She has her own black thermos on the table beside her, so she brought her own and bought one anyway, which tells you something about the coffee, or about Sunday. I took it past a dark blur in the foreground, so there is something between me and her, and that edge does more for the picture than I expected. It puts you at the next table, which is where I was.
The Window Table, Twice
Two older men at a table against the window, one in a grey golf shirt facing me with his cap upside down beside his cup, the other with his back to me, a tray of something between them and the drive-thru arrow outside the glass. I made two frames one second apart, 2:29:47 and 2:29:48. The first is wider and has a woman standing at the left edge with her hand at her chin, looking off across the room. She is not with them and she is not looking at them, she is just in the same second. The second is tighter, just the two men, the green trees and the red drive-thru sign out the window.
I kept both. The wider one went to black and white, because with the woman in it the picture is about three people not talking to each other and the colour was getting in the way of that. The tighter one stayed in colour because it is about the two of them on a sunny afternoon, and the red cup and the red sign and the green outside are the afternoon. Same second, two different pictures, and I could not tell you which one I like better.
Sunday at Tim Hortons Is a Room Full of Regulars
Half a minute before that I had most of the room in one frame. A big bald man in a black vest on his feet between the tables, looking across the room the way you look when you are deciding where to sit, or who to sit with. A man in a black cap bent over something on his table. A man in a blue shirt with his hand at his mouth. Over by the far window a man in a yellow shirt and sunglasses, with the high chairs stacked beside him. Four men, four red cups, the parking lot and a pale blue sky in every window, and nobody talking to anybody. I have sat in enough of these rooms around Toronto and the GTA to know that is not loneliness. Sunday at Tim Hortons is a room full of regulars who can be by themselves without being alone.
The One Who Looked Back
At 2:36 an older man in a grey jacket came past the catering banner on his way out, a coffee in one hand and a little paper bag in the other, and he looked straight down the lens. That happens. You sit long enough with a camera on the table and somebody notices, and I have never found anything better to do about it than not look away and not lift the camera any higher. His face is not annoyed and it is not friendly either, it is a man who has noticed something and decided it does not matter. Behind him the wall says Always Fresh Donuts, Daily Baked Pastries. He is the only person in the set looking at me.
The last frame, at 2:52, is the counter. A young man in glasses and a black sweater paying at the terminal, the red light on the card reader, the woman serving him looking down at her screen, the Canada Collection menu boards above them and people waiting behind him. I took it from my seat, low down, which is why so much ceiling is in it.
All six are the Leica Q3 at 28mm, available light, no flash, ever. On a bright day that room is all window on two sides and the light by the glass is better than most studios, ISO 100 at 1/640 by the window. Turn around toward the counter and it is ISO 1000. Same coffee, same twenty-five minutes.
This is the third of these. The first set was the regulars at the corner table, the second was everybody using the place as an office, and this one is Sunday at Tim Hortons, when nobody is working and nobody is in a hurry. The rest of the work is in my street photography projects, and there will be a fourth.
Thanks for looking!
