How Stoever Studios Started

It started with this darling photo I had taken of my daughter.

A couple of years after I took this photo, I found myself reminiscing about the baby days. I went looking for the few film photos I had taken at that time. I had taken mostly cell phone photos of her when she was a baby. I had previously delved into film in 2016 (she was born in 2020), but I did not have the headspace for my hobby in the early days of motherhood, and I didn’t fully integrate film photography back into my life until she was nearly three years old. So, I came upon this photo, and was looking for its film negative, wanting to make a print, and I couldn’t find it. I went back to the film lab to see if they still had it, and sadly, they didn’t (it was my fault; in the fog of postpartum I had never picked up the negatives from the lab, and they dispose of abandoned negatives). I suddenly and painfully realized the importance of keeping my negatives. I also began reflecting on the high value of using film photography to document my family life, as my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents had done before me. 

I decided I wanted the process fully in my own hands, away from the film lab, and thought, it couldn’t be too hard to do this myself at home. Well, it was hard, very frustrating at times, often panic inducing as it involved sitting in complete darkness in a confined space while the film escaped my attempts at spooling it onto the reel. But, it was totally worth it. Over time, I developed a system for developing and archiving film spotlessly and efficiently. What began with crouching in the darkness of my tiny bathroom evolved into installing custom blackout shades on my bedroom windows and obtaining an Intrepid compact enlarger to finally begin printing my work in my limited space. 

As my darkroom was coming together in a cramped corner of my bedroom, I dreamed also of having my own portrait studio. I had a roll of backdrop paper installed on a curtain rod and got myself beautiful vintage styled studio lighting. All this was going on in my 350 sq ft back house apartment on my maternal grandmother’s property in Glendale. In order to roll out the backdrop and set up my lighting, I would have to break down my dining table and move furniture outside, a cumbersome obstacle to using the studio. As my dreams, projects, and daughter all grew, it became increasingly apparent that I could not fit everything into this tiny space, and when an opportunity presented for us to move, we did, and I converted the space we had lived in for three years into my dedicated photography studio and darkroom.