TAMPA, Fla. — On a Tuesday morning in March, light pours through the wide windows of Coastal Film Lab. Two neon signs hang on the tall white walls: a flamingo, nodding to the owner’s Florida upbringing, and a lucky cat behind the register, a symbol of good fortune. Lo-fi music putters gently above the chatter of regulars who have stopped by to drop off yet another roll of film.
One employee checks in film — some from locals, others mailed in from as far as the Virgin Islands. A lab tech uses gloved hands to hang long, orange-brown 35mm negatives on S-hooks before feeding them through a scanner. On an oval table, another worker gently MacGyvers an old camera back to life, armed with Q-tips and toothpicks and syringes filled with isopropyl alcohol.
In the same room, customers can browse shelves of refurbished cameras, peruse a metal cabinet filled with camera accessories, or peer into a mini fridge stocked with film. They can stroll over to ask the techs a question about their latest project or sit with a friend on the couch by the windows and flip through photo books.
The chill vibes and open floor plan at Coastal Film Lab are intentional. Owner and founder Stephen Zane, a local commercial portrait photographer, wanted to create a space where creatives could find a home away from home: somewhere relaxing and inspiring, but never pretentious. The welcoming atmosphere is a big draw for his customers, many of whom are new to film photography.
“We have some people that have been into it for a while, or people that, like me, learned on the internet a few years ago. Or older people that are coming back to it,” Zane said. “But most of the people doing it are college kids, or even high school kids, that are just getting into it.”
“We’re all that personality type,” he continued. “You just go down the rabbit hole and never come out.”
Zane got sucked in when he was a teenager growing up in New Tampa and Riverside Heights. He started using a twin-lens reflex camera to capture square frames of landscapes, and sent his rolls off to be processed in Utah before learning how to develop black and white film at home.
“I really like cameras and mechanical things,” said Zane, now 26. “I wanted to have something that I didn’t have that sense of obsessing about what the image looked like right after I took it. It forced me to just be in the moment.”
Soon Zane was shooting nearly a dozen rolls (and spending hundreds of dollars on processing) each month. In the pursuit of a more economical system, Zane emptied his savings and purchased a $6,000 lab-grade film scanner. Oh shoot, he thought. What have I done?
At first, he just used the machine for himself and some friends. Then to help recoup his investment, he started a small side business out of his house. Customers dropped off film in his mailbox, and he scanned once a week.
When the pandemic hit, Zane’s commercial photography jobs dried up, so he started taking on more scanning jobs and hired two friends who had found themselves unemployed. By 2021, he and his wife, Julia, were expecting their first child and had finally outgrown the home setup. He signed a yearlong lease for a 2,000-square-foot space at 1704 N Nebraska Ave. The brick-and-mortar Coastal Film Lab officially opened in August, just two months before his son was born. Business tripled almost immediately.
Film photography has seen an upswing in the last five or so years, with even more folks picking up the hobby during the pandemic. While that means plenty of customers for Zane, the growing interest has made it harder to find equipment, especially since film companies stopped making most products in the early 2000s. Zane spends a lot of time digging around online for machines from labs that are closing down. He’s been known to fly to other states to scope out equipment in person.
“If you want to do this, you have to go find it all used, and the people that sell it are like the shadiest people you can imagine,” Zane said. “They call them the Minilab mafia.”
Alex Vicente, who has a background fixing cars, works on the cameras and equipment that come in.
“The more you look into mechanical systems, the more you’ll go, ‘Oh my God, this is all the same stuff just remixed into a different package,’” said Vicente, 26.
Vicente and Zane both have a hand in film processing, which happens in the back of the business. Black and white film spins around in a tank in one small room, and a waist-high machine, roughly the size and general appearance of an office printer, processes color film nearby. Arron McNeile, a St. Petersburg-based photographer who often shoots weddings on film, also works as a lab tech. Zane offered him a job after many conversations they had when McNeile would bring in his own film.
“In this community, there’s a lot of gatekeepers that are just like, ‘This is my secret, you’re not going to learn anything about it,’” said McNeile, 32. “So being here and watching all the customers come in and just chatting with us and becoming our friends is cool. You get people shooting film, all doing the same exact thing that keeps us alive, and you all have the same passion for it.”
The space also started hosting the occasional gallery show. Other times, photographers book time in the studio, which is decked out with multiple backdrops and tucked in the corner of the lab.
“The lab was the vehicle to make money, but we just wanted to make a space that was like a cultural center,” Zane said.
“I mean, eventually we’ll be able to make an OK living at it, but it’s never going to be something that we’re going to be, you know, making bank or whatever at. I just really love this.”
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