I finally did something I’ve been meaning to do for years – develop my own film. Not the kind of thing I wanted to learn from a late night YouTube spiral. This was something you learn standing next to someone who knows what they’re doing.

So I went back to another Copper Flair workshop.

We shot first. Then we put the film into a pop-up darkroom tent and tried to transfer the film from cylinder to spool film by feel alone – hands clumsy feeling around, blind in the dark, hoping muscle memory would show up when eyesight couldn’t. After that came the chemicals. The waiting. The quiet gamble of whether anything actually worked.

Then the scans came up.

And there they were.

There’s something honest about watching an image come back from a strip of film you handled the whole way through. Slower. Messier. More human.

Pretty cool experience.