Wednesday nights in the darkroom

I spend most of my professional life working fast.

Fast turnarounds. Fast edits. Fast decisions about what to keep and what to cut. My whole career is built around compressing the gap between raw material and finished story, and lately I’ve been building tools specifically designed to do that faster.

So it surprised me a little, a few weeks ago, to find myself standing in the darkroom at CASA on a Wednesday evening, completely still, watching an image slowly appear in a tray of developer. Waiting. Not checking my phone. Not running a mental to-do list. Just watching.

I’d signed up for the Film Photography class at CASA Lethbridge with instructor Kort W. on something between an instinct and a hunch. Wednesday nights, 7 to 9. Black and white. Manual settings, film development, darkroom printing with an enlarger. The whole process.

What I got was something I didn’t know I needed: a full stop.

The camera in the bag

I’m not shooting on a borrowed camera from the class kit. I’m shooting my dad’s Yashicamat 124G. A medium format twin-lens reflex that takes 120 film and produces these big, square, beautiful negatives. My dad had it for years. He passed away a few years ago, and the camera came to me along with a few other things.

I hadn’t picked it up in a while. Life and work and the pace of digital production made it easy to leave it in the bag.

Coming back to it in this class has been something I didn’t expect. There’s a particular quality to holding a camera that someone who mattered to you also held and looked through. You frame the same square viewfinder they framed. Your hands fall into the same positions. The shutter has the same sound it always had.

It’s not a sad experience. It’s something quieter than that. Present, in a way that’s hard to manufacture.

The thing about film

The Yashicamat gives me twelve frames per roll of 120 film. Twelve. Not three hundred. Not unlimited. Twelve chances to get it right before I have to think about what I’m doing and whether it’s worth another roll.

Digital lets you take hundreds of shots in seconds. Film gives you a set number of exposures and makes you live with it. And that limitation turns out to be exactly the point. Shooting film forces you to slow down.

That’s not a marketing line. It’s a real cognitive shift. When each frame has a cost attached, you stop and look. Actually look. You consider the light, the composition, what you’re trying to say. You make a decision and then you commit to it, because you can’t take it back.

I’ve been a visual storyteller for more than 27 years. I know how to look at things. But I’d forgotten how to look slowly. Kort’s class, and this camera, are reminding me there’s a difference between scanning for usable moments and actually seeing what’s in front of you.

What the darkroom does

The printmaking side of the class hit differently.

Darkroom printing is a heady mix of technical precision, creative intuition, and psychological fortitude. You’re managing chemistry, light, time, and paper all at once, with no undo button and no preview. You make a test strip. Evaluate it. Adjust the exposure, adjust the contrast, try again. A finished print can take hours: exposing test strips, dodging and burning, refining the balance, reprinting until every tone feels right.

The class covers aperture and shutter speed, how to match them to the ISO of your film, film development, and making prints with an enlarger. Composition, subject matter, and contrast all get explored. But what Kort is really teaching, underneath all of that, is patience. Attention. The understanding that the process isn’t separate from the result. It is the result.

None of this is efficient. It isn’t supposed to be.

What it is, is present. You can’t be distracted in a darkroom. The process won’t allow it. And something happens to your thinking when you remove the option of distraction: the work starts to feel like it matters in a way that’s hard to manufacture in front of a screen.

The hollow feeling I’d been ignoring

I want to be careful here, because I’m not anti-AI. I build AI tools for my own practice. I wrote and spoke about this publicly at the High Level Innovation Conference just last month. I believe AI can be a genuine multiplier for creative work when it handles friction rather than replacing judgment.

But I’d been noticing something in my own work that I didn’t have language for until the darkroom gave it to me.

AI can create stunning visuals, but the work often feels impersonal, detached from human experience. I’d been feeling that detachment from the inside. Prompting. Generating. Selecting. Iterating. Fast. Efficient. And somehow unsatisfying in a way that was hard to pinpoint.

The research gives it a name. We value things partly by the effort that went into making them. Objects read as more valuable when substantial effort was invested in their creation, and the sheer speed of AI can make it feel like almost no effort was invested at all.

That’s true for the audience looking at the work. But I think it’s also true for the person making it. When the effort disappears from your own creative process, something else disappears with it. Something that feels like authorship.

The Wednesday nights helped me figure out what I’d been missing.

What slow art gives back

The constraints of analog, the limited exposures, the delayed gratification, force a more considered approach and a heightened attention to the environment and the process itself. The slow photography movement is basically an intentional counter-practice to the culture of speed, a respite from information overload and constant connectivity.

That’s the academic language for what I experienced as just: relief.

Relief from the loop of generate, evaluate, discard, generate again. Relief from the distance between intention and output that AI introduces, where you describe what you want rather than make it with your hands. Relief from the particular exhaustion of creative work that moves too fast to feel like anything.

When you choose to shoot film, you’re making a quiet but powerful statement: this moment matters enough to slow down, to risk mistakes, to wait.

I hadn’t been saying that to myself about my work in a while.

And there’s something else. When I look through the waist-level viewfinder of the Yashicamat, I’m not just slowing down. I’m holding something my dad held. I’m seeing the world through an instrument he cared about. That’s not a workflow optimization. That’s something much older than optimization. It’s continuity. It’s a conversation with someone who’s no longer here, carried on in light and silver and paper.

That doesn’t show up in any productivity metric. It doesn’t need to.

The part that surprised me

I expected to come away from this feeling like analog and digital were opposites, and that I was choosing a side. That’s not what happened.

What I came away with was a clearer sense of what each way of working is actually for. Fast, AI-assisted production has a genuine place in my workflow. It handles the mechanical parts so I can focus on the parts that need judgment. But judgment requires taste, and taste requires time spent doing slow, intentional, effortful creative work where the outcome is uncertain and the process is the point.

The darkroom is where I go to remember what I’m actually trying to do when I pick up a camera. Not produce content. Not hit a deadline. See something. Commit to it. Make it physical.

The return to analog isn’t about rejecting technology. It’s about wanting authenticity, presence, and something you can hold. As digital fatigue sets in and attention fragments under endless content streams, film isn’t a gimmick. It’s a philosophy of seeing.

That’s the part I needed. Not a rejection of the tools I use professionally. A philosophy of seeing to put underneath all of them.

If you’re in Lethbridge and you’ve ever thought about trying this, the Film Photography class at CASA is exactly what you’re looking for. Kort is a thoughtful instructor and the darkroom access alone is worth it. Wednesday nights. The building smells like fixer and possibility.

And if you have a camera from someone you loved sitting in a bag somewhere, go get it. Load it. Take twelve frames.

They’re still in there with you when you do.