This is a few behind-the-scenes moments from something genuinely new for me: watching my first photographic print come to life.

I’ve spent years thinking in terms of negatives, contact sheets, scans, and screens, but a print is a different conversation entirely.

Sitting with the team at NICE and moving through the full process, film drop-off, development, scanning, and then into color printmaking, forced me to slow down and actually understand what I’d been handing off all these years.

Color printing, especially, was a revelation. The level of interpretation, calibration, and decision-making involved is wildly different from black and white, and honestly, it’s something I had almost no real understanding of before this moment.

Later this week, I’ll be releasing a YouTube video where we go deeper into that process in conversation with the NICE team. What happens to your film after you leave the lab, how color prints are built, and why printing is less about perfection and more about interpretation.