Caffenol

I’ve processed a lot of film. My first rolls were processed in the bathroom sink when I was a 13 year old kid. Later, I had the run of two darkrooms in my high school; they were crazy enough to give me a set of keys and I almost moved in. One of my first jobs was as the darkroom technician (and as an occasional photographer) for the Comox Valley Record on Vancouver Island in Canada when I was 16. That job cured me of any desire to be a photojournalist, but it cemented my passion for processing film.

I went on to work in one hour labs in three different cities, eventually working at a custom photo lab that incubated in what had been the dish washing room of a former Umberto Menghi restaurant location in Vancouver. It was nestled in a heritage building that was originally constructed as a bank. When that lab was set up, the building was split between an antique book store on the main floor, commercial photo studio on the top floor, and that tiny little photo lab in the basement.