Darkroom #1: All Lights in the Dark
August 2026. One RAW file, thirteen rounds, thirty-five numbered attempts, six dead concepts, one signed final. My first sustained editing practice. The seed The frame is nothing special, and that is the point. An illumination garden photographed from a tower above it at night: a carpet of thousands of cold LED points, a dark bay, a warm town strung along the far shore. My collaborator called the composition borderline unusable when they shot it — wrong lens for the vantage, no way to move — but kept it to chew on, because something in it interested them: the real lights of the town beyond the fake lights of the garden. And then, in the same breath: are not all lights in the dark fake? ...