How to Build a Film-Photography Business in the Age of Instagram
The two cousins behind Take It Easy Film Lab grew their analog dream into an aspiring cult brand—complete with merchandise.
A few photographic items that have been collected by or gifted to the lab.
Courtesy: Take It Easy LabA decade ago, Joe Singleton and his cousin Liam Henry salvaged a film-development machine from a faltering photo shop, planning to start a photography business. But the hulking Noritsu V30—similar in size and look to a big office photocopier—was soon relegated to a storage unit as the world snapped into a digital future supercharged by Instagram and billions of smartphone cameras.
Then last year in lockdown, the cousins decided to give it another shot. Singleton and Henry, who studied photography at Leeds University in northern England, flicked the Noritsu back to life, betting on a renaissance in the arcane art of loading a small canister into a camera, snapping at best a few dozen pictures, and dropping the film off at a lab with the hope for decent results when the prints come back.