I sold a photograph today.

It's been hanging in a local cafe for a little over a year.

Today, as I was cleaning it up and getting it ready to go to its new home, I found myself looking at it a little closer, a little differently.

It's a print made from an 8x10 ambrotype of Sheringham Point Lighthouse on Vancouver Island.

Truthfully, I've struggled to like this photograph. I see all the things that went wrong when I made it. The developer pour wasn't particularly good. I remember the light leak I eventually discovered in my plate holder. I remember the frustrations of making the plate and all the little things I would do differently now. I see the technical shortcomings before I see the photograph itself.

I suppose that's one of the peculiarities of making photographs using a process like wet plate collodion. You don't just see the finished image. You remember everything that went into making it.

I've often felt that if I'm going to use a photographic process dating back to the 1860s, I should at least be able to make something that looks as good as, if not better than, the photographs being made today. Clean, sharp, technically sound. I can be rather unforgiving of my own work.

But today, as I spent a little more time looking at this particular print, I started noticing things I'd overlooked or forgotteen about.

There are faint, almost ghostly figures of people walking around the lighthouse. Little half-formed silhouettes of someone standing at the lookout. They are barely there, but they were there.

And I started thinking about this place. About the people who built the lighthouse. About the people who maintained it. The mariners who depended on its light to find their way along this coast. I thought about all the people who have stood on that rocky point over the years, looking out across the Juan de Fuca Strait.

I thought about the early wet plate photographers of the 1860s, carrying their cameras, chemicals, glass plates and portable darkrooms into remote places to make photographs of a world that was changing around them.

Here I was, more than 160 years later, using essentially the same process to photograph a place that has its own long history. There is something about that connection that I hadn't really considered when I made the photograph.

And then there's the person who bought it.

They told me that Sheringham Point holds particular meaning for them. I don't know all the reasons, and perhaps I don't need to. What I do know is that there are hundreds, probably thousands, of photographs of this lighthouse. Beautiful colour photographs, technically perfect images, sharp and detailed photographs made with equipment that can capture things I could only dream of with my old cameras.

And they chose mine.

I find that hard to comprehend sometimes.

I spend so much time looking at my work through the eyes of the person who made it. I know where I made mistakes. I know what I could have done better. I know what the photograph was supposed to look like.

But the person who bought it doesn't carry any of that baggage. They see something else. Something that connects with their own lived experience of a place that matters deeply to them.

And now I'm finding that letting this photograph go is a little harder than I expected.

I've lived with it for a long time. Even when it was hanging in the cafe, it was still mine. I could visit it, look at it, remember making it.

Today, as I prepare to pack it up, there's a certain heaviness to the thought that I'll probably never see this particular print again.

It almost feels like another small loss.

But perhaps that's part of making photographs, and eventually putting them out into the world. At some point, they stop being entirely yours. They take on a meaning and a history of their own, one that you can't necessarily know or control.

I made this photograph, but someone else found something in it that I hadn't fully seen myself.

Maybe that's enough.

Maybe it's more than enough.