How does film drop off and development work?

We enjoy doing development and scanning for the community. By providing that service at a suggested cost, that helps us support our other programming and workshops. While being a dev house isn’t our primary community goal, we will continue to provide it. A few notes on this: We process all film by hand in Patterson tanks. And we scan using flatbed scanners. As a result, we are slow in comparison to other labs. If you need expedited service, we can recommend other labs, and as always, we are more than happy to teach you how to do development yourself, and that is the quickest way to get your film back.

Can you make prints?

Not exactly, currently. A more tradtional lab has very nice Noritsu printers, spitting out 4x6 for folks. I have worked wiht these and they are awesome. They are also frequently the size of VW beetle, so due to space reasons, we don;t have one in the shop. Our darkroom is always available for folks to make prints from their negatives and we can offer limited inkjet printing from scans, with an expanded selection in the future.

How do classes and workshops work?

We run our classes over the course of our open hours on that given week. I know it seems confusing, but we keep our class sizes small and try to run our classes in the drop-in/drop-out fashion to be as flexible as possible for the community. An average one-week class has roughly 6~8 hours of concepts we can go over. If you feel like you need more, feel free to show up more; if you need less, then show up less. Our workshop schedule is typically more rigid in times and days, because we frequently have more set-up and or only have the facilitator for a set amount of time. Our only request for workshops is please don’t register if you won’t be able to attend, or if you need to cancel, please let us know as early as possible so we can open that slot for another community member.

Do I have to take a class to use the facilities?

Not at all! We encourage everyone to take a class or workshop, but we recognize that many people may have some previous photography experience and need a refresher in the darkroom or digital lab. Our staff is also always happy to help introduce you to the space and help to give you an overview of the processes we run, depending on how busy we are. We’re also excited to help with any kind of photography-related questions, so don’t be shy about asking!

How does your pricing work?

We follow a pay-what-you-can model.. We don’t want anyone to feel like they can’t be part of the community or work in the space due to financial reasons. Please feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions or concerns, as we are always more than happy to help in any way we can!

Is this a photographers-only space?

Despite the name, the Tacoma Photo Center is open to everyone! In addition to hosting life drawing nights and art markets, we love to work with artists of all kinds, and to practice any artistic medium you’re interested in in our space (provided we have the space and tools to help). Our founder’s background is in analog and digital photography, as well as analog and digital film production, which are the most substantial areas we can help. However, our community includes artists of all sorts of mediums, and we’re excited to see anything you’re working on!

What’s the best way to contact you if I have questions about film processing times or donation drop off?

We’re happy to help in any way we can! Feel free to reach us any way you like but for purposes of response times, we tend to respond to phone calls within about 24 hours. Please leave a voicemail, as we are frequently away from the phone. We check our email often, and if you have a specific question for Drew, you should feel free to email him directly. If you choose to text us, we’ll do our best to respond within an hour or so, provided you’re texting during our regular hours of operation. When texting, please introduce yourself so that we know you are a customer, as the modern world comes with too many spam texts. We also respond to our DMs on our Instagram page within about a day.