Safelight Labs and Uptown 11 team up to create new platform for visual storytelling

For nearly four decades, Camera Exposure has served as a community resource for friends of photography from its storefront at Adams Avenue and Oregon Street.

It’s weathered the medium’s evolution from film to digital and back to film again. It’s been committed to providing San Diegans with a safe space to learn about and care about photography.

Decades later, Rob Cowan and Caitie Boreliz were on a similar mission. The pair had been hosting darkroom developing parties in their apartment bathroom. The events were so popular that they opened Safelight Labs in downtown San Diego to provide a community space to learn about processing photos.

In 2020, the opportunity came up for Cowan and Boreliz to purchase Camera Exposure. They jumped at the chance and promptly began the work of integrating Safelight Labs.

Today, the shop is at the center of a growing community of photography lovers — a top spot in town to develop and process film, an accessible, simple rental space for studio shoots and a growing hotspot for hosting workshops, events and gallery shows.

What makes Safelight special isn’t the space itself, it’s what passes through the doors.

Every day, photographers stop by to develop rolls of film that collectively tell the story of our region. Camera Exposure is where you can get all the tools you need to tell a story. Safelight Labs is the story production factory — where expert technicians carefully handle precious negatives from professional and amateur photographers.

Photography is at its best when shared with an audience. That’s where we come in. This year, I founded a creative agency called Uptown 11 Studios, named after the #11 train that brought San Diegans to Adams Avenue in the early 1900s. After working for decades as a photojournalist, I made it my mission to help organizations in San Diego connect more deeply to the community with visual storytelling.

With our mission so squarely aligned with Safelight Labs and Uptown 11 partnered to bring you this new blog, titled “Developing Stories.” This is the space where we’ll share the stories coming out this little story production factory.

To make this work, we need to hear from you. If you’d like us to share some of the work you’ve been producing at Safelight Labs, or know of a fantastic story, please share it with sam@uptown11.com.

And to stay up to date on the latest, sign up for our newsletter at the bottom of the page. We promise we’ll only bug you when something interesting is developing.