Black and White Labs

I am thinking of resurrecting something I did years ago. I opened a very high quality Black and White Lab in Pasadena California. We quickly captured a lot of clients that insisted on high quality prints for their clients. Mostly Commercial as in advertising. So here is my question. Now that I am retired, I have lots of time and love working in the darkroom I have very good equipment and use only good paper and chemicals. I am wondering if I advertise my services, would I garner any work? I am in the happy position that I can under cut the competition price wise as I would have no employees and all my equipment is paid for. Just my time and the expendables. Does anyone think this is an idea worth pursuing? I could take out small ads, even a banner ad here on APUG to get the name out. What does everyone think? Feel free to email me at lightwisps@yahoo.com or pm me here. Thanks, looking forward to your thoughts and suggestions. Don

Go for it! You will either get business or not, but you'll never know until you try. You have an advantage because you already have prior experience running a DR business.

The good new there are no more One Hour FOTO, Walmarts and other doing cheap work.
They just flooded the market with cheap work for over 20 years
Now the small shops can come back with the good work. I still have boxes of triple pic's .

Dave

lightwisps said:

I am thinking of resurrecting something I did years ago. I opened a very high quality Black and White Lab in Pasadena California. We quickly captured a lot of clients that insisted on high quality prints for their clients. Mostly Commercial as in advertising. So here is my question. Now that I am retired, I have lots of time and love working in the darkroom I have very good equipment and use only good paper and chemicals. I am wondering if I advertise my services, would I garner any work? I am in the happy position that I can under cut the competition price wise as I would have no employees and all my equipment is paid for. Just my time and the expendables. Does anyone think this is an idea worth pursuing? I could take out small ads, even a banner ad here on APUG to get the name out. What does everyone think? Feel free to email me at lightwisps@yahoo.com or pm me here. Thanks, looking forward to your thoughts and suggestions. Don

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a try

It's worth a try. You could open up your shop and advertise and see how it goes without spending much money. Ideal situation. In this day and age I have to wonder if you will not need a blog, too. Something that will chat up your background, experience, reliability and so on. And to give helpful hints to people who are new to film photography and to show some of your finished work. I think I saw you are in Canada. Would there be a big customs hassle if someone from the States wanted to use your services? You would need to be able to communicate things like that.
I, personally, am paranoid about sending my "priceless" negatives off somewhere. You need to reassure people about the safety of their work. I had a local lab make blowups of a photo I took of the Beatles and learned that the lab staff had made nine bootleg prints for themselves of the image. I taught classes in photography and the students expressed the same fears. Good luck.

I don't know how much demand there would be. I did run across this once when I was asked by someone to process some film and make some prints. The end client was a band, who wanted film shots of them in concert. The photographer who took the shots no longer had a darkroom, and I did the processing and printing. It was a small project (about 6 rolls of MF film), and was fun. I was compensated with concert tickets.

If you already have a functioning darkroom, there is little cost to try it out - put a notice on Craigslist and see if anybody bites.

I think most do extensive feasibility studies before starting a business at a certain location. I'm sure you know that. Ilford did some work to determine the need for a darkroom, the result is localdarkroom.com . Check it out.

Undercut the competition ???? NEVER!

Well, since you are going to be doing the darkroom work for your self anyway, why not supplement the income with a little paid work. Like you say, no additional overhead or capital expenses to incur, and maybe all you will make is enough to pay for your supplies. But, be careful what you ask for, you could end up with another business on your hands.

I would call The Black and White Lab in Tempe, Az and get some feedback on this. That's all they do, B&W printing, and it's all custom. I've used them and they do exceptional work. Not cheap, but this sort of thing is not cheap.

I see that they now do color printing as well.

I worked with a local guy for years. Recently he closed up shop and retired. He was good...really good and I've been looking for somebody to make prints again. Although Pasadena is not quite local, I'm very interested in finding somebody nearby who can make decent prints. Keep us informed of our situation please.

(EDIT: to be clear, the local guy was a master printer. I was just a customer).

I'll be doing something similar where I am at in Aspen, it will be part of a bigger plan though and I will need to keep volume low as I don't want to become a slave to it.

Good on you for moving into it though!

Worth pursuing? You'll never know until you try.

Undercut the competition? Perfectly fine as long as you're honest about it. By honest, I mean letting customers know the limitations of your service:
- What turnaround time is to be expected?
- Who's going to make the prints when you're sick or on vacation?
- Who do they talk to when they're unhappy (justified or not) with the print you make?

In other words, your "one man operation" comes with both benefits and limitations. Be honest about them and let the customer decide.

Be realistic about the back office aspects. Receiving and logging negatives. Mailing prints. Billing. Responding to phone calls and emails. Who's going to do that?

Take a bit of time and develop a simple but informative static website hosted on GoDaddy or 1and1 or whatever. Nothing fancy, but communicate your services, prices, experience, and facility. It can save a lot of time answering inquiries.

Go for it.

Unless I have misunderstood the OP's situation there is no risk involved at all as there is no financial investment required so if it is what he'd like to do then it's a "no brainer". He doesn't need to do extensive or even any business research.

The only risk is that his quality v his charges means that he is overwhelmed and can't cope, in which case his clients either wait a while for prints or he rations by price.

He might even do well enough to need to train others in analogue darkroom skills and thereby "spread the word"

OP, my very best wishes and let us know how it goes if you go ahead

pentaxuser

Modification on lab idea

Wow, lots of good responses and I thank everyone for them. Even got a pm and an email on the subject.

What I am actually interested in is filling a niche. Lots of my fellow APUGers have darkrooms of their own and that is great. However I have noticed that because of their darkroom size, they are limited in the size prints that they can make. I can do up to 20X24 from everything from 35mm through 4X5 inch negs. There is something magical about a 20X24 fiber print!!

It was mentioned about turn around time. Usually 2 days. I am now living outside of Ottawa Ontario, but have no problem getting negs from the states and returning the prints. That is easy. I am also very precise in my cropping. If the client marks up a scanned print or even a proof sheet, I can get very close to his exact wishes.

I am not looking to get rich doing this, just spend more time and for me its fun to print for others. There is a challenge in getting the contrast exactly as the client likes and how much to burn and dodge. A lot of cerebral work in fact. I pace around like a chicken without a head waiting to hear from the client about how he likes my work.

Please feel free to ask any questions. Thanks again, Don

I sort of decided to do this in Columbus, only I am interested mainly in developing film. I passed out a bunch of business cards, and so far I have had one customer. I also do scanning and contact printing, and I list custom printing, but I'm not sure I'll get any of that. Anyway, I can see your expenses limited to advertising costs. Personally, I'm not going to advertise. If I get business, great, and if not, that's OK, too. And I don't want too much business. What we do is labor intensive. I have a friend who is a professional photographer; he encourages me to advertise. But he has gotten $2500 for a shoot. I can't do that developing negatives.

Anyway, good luck. And if there are any folks in Central Ohio who need film developed, scanned or proofed, I'm available!

lightwisps said:

There is something magical about a 20X24 fiber print!!

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So true. I did my first 50x60mc fiber prints recently from 35mm Kodak TP - and there is something magical about it .

And about your idea for business: go for it!

mfohl, I can't speak for Ohio or the U.S. in general as I have no knowledge of your situation but there may well be a niche market. In the U.K. there are those who prefer trad B&W film to chromogenic B&W but few if any labs are geared up to develop trad B&W whereas they can make a reasonable stab at printing from trad B&W negs onto RA4 paper. So unless there is a trad B&W developer such as you the customers have no choice but to use C41 chromogenic film if they want prints from the labs.

You provide the "missing link" so to speak.

Best of luck

pentaxuser

There is definitely a need for specialized black & White processing, of a high level of quality in Canada.
My personal need is for top quality developing and scanning.

JEB
Halifax

It might be worth looking into the effluent regulations in your area first. I don't know too much about Canadian regulations, but more than likely they're similar to those in the US. In the US, the normal procedure used to be that you would obtain a sewer permit, which lays out all the details. But in some places, the silver levels are so unreasonably low that almost no one could meet them; the main recourse was to use waste haulers who had specialized treatment facilities.

The regulations are established by the local municipality, and if you are lucky they will have either a sensible silver limit or possibly a small-user exemption. So you should start out by getting a copy of the regulations. I wouldn't want to show up on their "radar" until I was ready to actually do it.

If you opened in Pasadena I'd be a customer. Otherwise, maybe not unless I saw example of the quality first. I'm sure youb are good but my happiness with B+W printers has been about 50 pct.

See if any of the colour/digital print labs can offer referral business.