Why We're Building Ilsee™

Before Ilsee was a product, it was a question:

What if making a darkroom print didn't require having a darkroom?

We’ve always loved the process of making photographic prints. There's something about the chemistry, the red glow of the safelight in the darkroom, watching an image you created appear on paper — it all feels magical. It's slow and physical and a little unpredictable. You can't just tap a button and move on.

You have to pay attention.

We learned traditional darkroom printing in college and eventually had our own enlarger. For a while, making prints by hand was simply part of how we made photographs.

Then life changed.

Corporate jobs took over. We moved across the country. Space became limited. The enlarger went into storage, and eventually we sold it.

But we didn't stop loving the process. We just stopped having a practical way to do it.

Years later, photography came back into our lives in a different way. And, like most people, we found ourselves carrying an incredibly powerful camera around in our pockets every day.

We’re talking about our iPhones.

And this created a strange little contradiction.

The device in our hand could capture an extraordinary photograph, but if we wanted to turn that photograph into a traditional silver gelatin darkroom print, we still needed a fairly specialized setup, a darkroom, an enlarger, and a whole lot of space.

We started wondering: what if there were another way?

Not a replacement for the darkroom.

Not an attempt to make digital photography look like film.

Something different.

A way to take an image that already exists on your phone and use it to make a real photographic print.

This is something that Brandon had been thinking about for a long time.

Brandon is an iOS app developer, so his instinct was naturally to start exploring about how the iPhone itself could become part of the process.

Lia was coming at the problem from the other direction: how could we make traditional darkroom photography accessible to more people?

Together, we started experimenting.

And experimenting.

And experimenting.

Eventually, those experiments became Ilsee.

Ilsee is our attempt to bring some of the magic of the darkroom into a much smaller, more accessible setup. It combines an iPhone, custom hardware, software, and traditional photographic materials to create silver gelatin prints from images on your phone.

The technology is new.

The process is very old.

And that's exactly what we like about it.

We're not trying to make analog photography faster or more convenient just for the sake of convenience. We're interested in what happens when modern technology gives you a new way into an old process.

There is something wonderful about making a photograph that exists on a screen become something you can hold in your hands.

That's what we're exploring with Ilsee.

We're still figuring it out.

And we're going to share that process as we go.