Any former processing lab people out there?

It’s nice to see this thread I started almost 5 years ago still gets the occasional attention. When it comes to stories about working the labs, I have a few.

It was 1975 and I had just exited my time in the military having spent the past 14 months guarding nukes in Europe, working 24 on/24 off with no breaks. I’d picked up the photography/darkroom passion in the service and when I saw the ad for this lab I figured it was perfect.

I showed up at the camera store that fronted the place and met the color lab manager. He explained that the job was for a film cutter on the midnight shift. That suited me because it was a steady shift as opposed to what I had been working and I could go to school during the day. I said that it sounded good to me and I wanted the job. He sighed and motioned me to follow him into a back hallway.

When we were out of earshot of anyone else, he said “Look, you don’t want this job. It’s boring. It’s just cutting strips of film and putting them into envelopes for 8 hours per night. You’ll hate it and in a few weeks you’ll quit and I’ll have to go through the hiring process again. It’s really a job for a woman because they don’t mind boring jobs but I can’t run an ad that says that.”

I told him that I can do boring because I’d just spent that last 14 months doing boring guarding nukes, either on a gate or in a guard tower. I eventually convinced him and got the job. I cut film for about 8 months and then moved up to a printer position. I was the best film cutter they ever had. They had me on the midnight shift and a young woman on the day shift who would cut what didn’t get finished during the night. I cut everything and she had nothing to do and happily got trained to do color spotting and retouching.

We were a “Kodak Lab” in that we used only Kodak chemicals, paper, and machines. The manager of the lab, the one who had hired me but worked days, had been there for years and ran it like a fiefdom and nepotism abounded. The business had been started years ago and the origainal own had passed away and left it to his daughter. She worked in an office and just let each department manager do their own thing.

Kodak showed up and offered to do an audit to measure what our waste was with the further offer to show us, for free, how to improve our quality and timing. The 24-hours service feature was just starting. She agreed and they came in with special trash cans and all scrap prints and rejects were to be placed in them so Kodak could weigh them and compare that to the paper we bought from them. During those days, individual printer operators would set up their machines and errors abounded. Sometimes entire rolls of paper would come out of the processor completely off in color or exposure or some other avoidable problem.

Near the end of the audit period, the manager got caught hauling the waste paper out to the dumpster to avoid it being weighed. Between that and the results of the audit, which were terrible, I couldn’t believe it, but the owner fired him. There was a big shake up in the lab as his wife left and took a bunch of her friends. My friend who ran the print processor was promoted to manager and I was sent to Kodak school to learn how to do quality control. From then on I came in ahead of the shift (actually they had their hours moved back two hours) and I set up all the machines, ran QC on the processors, and then took over lots of other tasks related to that. In the next year I heard we had reduce the cost of running the lab by over 1 million dollars.

So, I was making $5/hour and I’d talked to my counterparts in other labs and heard they were making $8.50. I asked for a raise to $6.50 and, considering how much we had saved, they could afford it. She gave me a 25 cent/hour hour raise and her reasoning was that some people had worked there longer than I had and they’d be upset if they found out I made more than they did.

Of course, I quit.

I then went and moonlighted for a month at another lab, a new one, set them up on the Kodak QC system and their sales people went after the other lab’s accounts which was easy since they were missing their 24-hour deadlines and the quality had gone down the drain.

I had just finished some schooling then so after that month I left that lab, put my camping gear on my motorcycle and roamed the US and Canada for a few months until I was out of money and returned to start a new career in a completely different area, a career path that took me to retirement.

Ah, those were the days.

VinceInMT said:

It’s nice to see this thread I started almost 5 years ago still gets the occasional attention. When it comes to stories about working the labs, I have a few.

Ah, those were the days.

Click to expand...

Great story, Vince!

My first job was riding a 50 pound bicycle in San Francisco as a bike messenger. I was 19, it was 1979 and for 3 years I rode around The City taking pictures of everyone and everything with my sturdy Canon A1. Then one day I was shooting at some dude and up from the ground came some bubbling...water. It was raining. I went inside to pick up a package and the owner asked me if I wanted to ride for him, on a motorcycle at a custom graphic arts lab.
Yes. Northern Lights Photo did pre-press work, typesetting, photostats, rub-downs, mock-ups and the brightest darkrooms I had ever seen. I moved inside, ditched the bike and made stats for the next 3 years. Stats are a 2-part paper positive, using a paper negative attached to a vacuum plate of a 20x24 copy camera. The vacuum plate holds the negative paper (or film) and closes like an oven door, hinged at the sides so the plate can be horizontal when open. A very dim light over the plate gives a 2 and/or 3rd exposure when making halftones to clean up the highlights (the bump) or open up shadows (the burn). The negative is sandwiched with the positive ceramic-coated paper and fed into a chemical bath through a roller, it cooks a minute and hits the fix and wash tanks. I made posters for my friends of them playing at shows (Mabuhay, Keystone, Omni, The Farm...) for access to backstage.
I put myself through film school at SF State making photocopies at night at ChromaCopy on 2nd St.
Then I went next door to Ziba and was trained by the owner who apprenticed for Ansel Adams. We did larger format commercial transparencies 50x80 up to 100-ish inches that would end up in light boxes at the airport, scarves and jewelry. We printed from 8x10 chromes the owner shot upstairs. Dip and dunk E-6, C-41 and B&W, roller transport for the prints, two 50"set of tanks. I mixed all the chemistry (we had two labs, SF and Berkeley) did control strips and made thousands of portraits of "Shirley". In Berkeley I printed the little stuff, 8x10 up to 16x20 fine art work for pros, and in SF very large stuff, 20" rolls and up. I loved this job very much.
A few more years at Faulkner and Robyn Color spending quality time in the dark alone in a closet with an enlarger, seeing the end coming for miles. It was sad seeing digital put lab after lab out of business. Even Robyn Color who embraced it, and had scanning services before digital cameras became a thing. We had high res scans of medium and large format chromes and negs and printed on a plotter (a really nice one but still an inkjet) but alas. Faulkner had 26 darkrooms, 3 of us printing.
I loved being a lab rat, made some great friends I still have. 22 years. I mean, free film processing and printing was magical. I was shooting 5-20 rolls a week night time, time lapse and long exposure light painting. I still do it but after 25 years as a sparky, I retired. Next up get a skoolie, gut it, make it cozy and go take some pictures.

this sounds like a fun thread. Here’s mine:

I met my wife working at a Wolf Camera in St. Louis. She was the lab manager. I was hired in sales. And she couldn’t stand me when we first met (so she says now).

nomadhacker said:

this sounds like a fun thread. Here’s mine:

I met my wife working at a Wolf Camera in St. Louis. She was the lab manager. I was hired in sales. And she couldn’t stand me when we first met (so she says now).

Click to expand...

Reminds me of the old joke. "Come into the darkroom and see what develops."

AndyHess said:

My first job was riding a 50 pound bicycle in San Francisco as a bike messenger. I was 19, it was 1979 and for 3 years I rode around The City taking pictures of everyone and everything with my sturdy Canon A1. Then one day I was shooting at some dude and up from the ground came some bubbling...water. It was raining. I went inside to pick up a package and the owner asked me if I wanted to ride for him, on a motorcycle at a custom graphic arts lab.
Yes. Northern Lights Photo did pre-press work, typesetting, photostats, rub-downs, mock-ups and the brightest darkrooms I had ever seen. I moved inside, ditched the bike and made stats for the next 3 years. Stats are a 2-part paper positive, using a paper negative attached to a vacuum plate of a 20x24 copy camera. The vacuum plate holds the negative paper (or film) and closes like an oven door, hinged at the sides so the plate can be horizontal when open. A very dim light over the plate gives a 2 and/or 3rd exposure when making halftones to clean up the highlights (the bump) or open up shadows (the burn). The negative is sandwiched with the positive ceramic-coated paper and fed into a chemical bath through a roller, it cooks a minute and hits the fix and wash tanks. I made posters for my friends of them playing at shows (Mabuhay, Keystone, Omni, The Farm...) for access to backstage.
I put myself through film school at SF State making photocopies at night at ChromaCopy on 2nd St.
Then I went next door to Ziba and was trained by the owner who apprenticed for Ansel Adams. We did larger format commercial transparencies 50x80 up to 100-ish inches that would end up in light boxes at the airport, scarves and jewelry. We printed from 8x10 chromes the owner shot upstairs. Dip and dunk E-6, C-41 and B&W, roller transport for the prints, two 50"set of tanks. I mixed all the chemistry (we had two labs, SF and Berkeley) did control strips and made thousands of portraits of "Shirley". In Berkeley I printed the little stuff, 8x10 up to 16x20 fine art work for pros, and in SF very large stuff, 20" rolls and up. I loved this job very much.
A few more years at Faulkner and Robyn Color spending quality time in the dark alone in a closet with an enlarger, seeing the end coming for miles. It was sad seeing digital put lab after lab out of business. Even Robyn Color who embraced it, and had scanning services before digital cameras became a thing. We had high res scans of medium and large format chromes and negs and printed on a plotter (a really nice one but still an inkjet) but alas. Faulkner had 26 darkrooms, 3 of us printing.
I loved being a lab rat, made some great friends I still have. 22 years. I mean, free film processing and printing was magical. I was shooting 5-20 rolls a week night time, time lapse and long exposure light painting. I still do it but after 25 years as a sparky, I retired. Next up get a skoolie, gut it, make it cozy and go take some pictures.

Click to expand...

My wife and I owned and ran Horizon Photographic Laboratory in Hayward. We closed the lab in 1980. Earlier in this thread you can find a posting about some of the lab details. At 80, I'm still shooting. At home I have (my wife passed in 2009, or it would have been "we") two Canon large-format printers (24" and 44"), processing for C41, E6, and mainly Delta 100. Temp control and filtered-air drying setup. Shooting with my 501CM and my new 907X with a few XCD and HC lenses, but I can also use all my old glass on the 907X. Digital and analog. Thank you, Mr. Victor for allowing a blend like that. Hope to meet you some day! Bill Bailey

Lawrence_8965 said:

I found this website quite by accident while doing a nostalgic search on the web for information on the old C-22 Processing Machine I learned to operate back in 1968. A bit of background: I was a Junior in high school and had just joined the high school camera club. There, I met a guy who taught me how to take action shots during night football games and how 35mm SLR cameras worked (my first!). Prior to that, my first camera was actually a Polaroid self developing camera.

I learned that my new friend worked (after school) at a commercial photo processing lab developing B&W negative film and that they were looking for someone to fill an opening running the C-22 Color Processing machine so I applied and with his recommendation, I got the job.
My job was to load racks with 10 rolls of film both 126 and 135mm for the older guy in the darkroom who then loaded the machine. Of course the film had to be extracted from the 126 cartridges or the 135mm cannisters, hung from clips, unrolled and clipped with weights. The machine would then take the racks, lift them up and lower them into tanks of chemicals one every two minutes. Once the machine moved the racks of film through all of the chemicals, it would move them into a large dryer machine.

Primarily, my job was to remove the customer's film from their envalope, add a number sticker to the envalope and an identical number to the rack behind a spring-loaded clip where the film cartidge of cannister was held and once the rack had all 10 slots filled, move the rack into a box system in the wall of the darkroom. Inside, the technician would take the rack, place it on the machine, strip each film from its cartidge or cannister, hang it on the clip and clip a weight on it.
Later, I learned how to work in the darkroom myself and got quite good at it. I worked at this lab for over 4 years and became the lead tech on that machine when the older guy (mid-60's) I worked with retired. But I was not given the supervisor's title. They hired another older (mid-30's) guy for that position.

The lab I worked for serviced a tri-state area with customers in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri. We had 6 drivers who picked up film from camera shops and drug stores throughout the three states and delivered the negatives and prints back to the customers on a daily basis (excluding Sundays).
During my time working there, I learned alot about the C-22 process (and later the C-41 process) and the machine that processed the film. My work shift was typically from 4PM to midnight depending on the volume of the workload each night and it was not uncommon for me to work 16 hour days right after Christmas and New Years.

Click to expand...

Great story! Thank you for showing up here.