Photographing bank robberies

Blog posts on darkrooms I have known and loved ...

I'm running a series on my blog about the personal darkrooms I've built over the years, including one for an employer: a bank security company back in the 80s, when film was still used in surveillance cameras. It was in this job that I learned to be consistent and efficient in the darkroom!

Part 4 of 6 is here: https://silverdarkroom.wordpress.com/2015/02/15/my-darkrooms-part-4-of-6-on-the-job/

Fun

Hey, fun stuff. Quite a job you had there. Well, there were worse jobs and you learned a lot. You are right. The average bank robber is not too swift. A lot of them rob the same bank more than once. They get into a groove and I guess think it will always work. Strange.

Fascinating shot of the bank robber. Were the cameras automated to shoot on a time delay continuously or did the tellers have a remote way of firing the shutter?

This business of proving chain of custody of bank robbery photographs in the days of film is interesting to me.

There is a period of time when no human can see the film/negative, and can't touch it. How does one prove chain of custody in court?

I believe Saul Goodman, ace lawyer, could get the pictures thrown out of court. Better Call Saul!

Great image quality on that photo. Killer darkroom too, compared to mine!

Mike Crawford said:

Were the cameras automated to shoot on a time delay continuously or did the tellers have a remote way of firing the shutter?

Click to expand...

Good question.

The cameras were motor driven at a rate of about one frame per second - perhaps a bit faster. Tellers could activate the cameras with a button under their station for as long as they held the button down. This was for the "suspicion" shots if a teller thought somebody was casing the bank, the transaction seemed fishy, or they were just acting odd. The cameras were also turned on when the alarm was tripped (silently, just like in the movies) and ran until the alarm was reset. This usually ran the roll of film out.

The alarm could be tripped by a teller with another button (yes, they sometimes got them confused) or by devices in the cash drawers.

The methodology changed with the technology. Once the transition to videotape happened, there was constant taping at a low resolution (very low, almost useless) which could switch to high resolution on tripping of the alarm. The problem with the tape, besides low resolution, was somebody had to remember to change the tape cartridge periodically.

I had a Phillips enlarger like that for a while. Great enlarger, and great story!

Thanks, interesting story & pic!

Slightly off the OP's topic, but how is it amusement parks can get a tack sharp photo of you zooming down a near vertical drop at 80 mph, but surveillance photos of a bank robber are so blurred or dark you could never tell who robbed them.........

Rick A said:

Slightly off the OP's topic, but how is it amusement parks can get a tack sharp photo of you zooming down a near vertical drop at 80 mph, but surveillance photos of a bank robber are so blurred or dark you could never tell who robbed them.........

Click to expand...

Flash!

David, I take it that the person in the darkroom is you. If so and I hope you won't mind me saying this, but at that range you bear quite a resemblance to Lee Harvey Oswald based purely on the very grainy pictures I have seen of him.

I wonder if I am alone in spotting this and no, this is not a lead-in to a joke. Simply a reaction to a photo

pentaxuser

Photographing bank robberies

This has got to be one of the best thread titles I have ever seen on APUG.

Candid camera

Nice "grab" shot. Ha! You look very suave in that lab gear.

I actually walked into a bank while a robbery was in progress on Van Ness Ave in S.F. once. Like your guy, mine had no mask on either. He was just a young yuppie looking guy in a leather jacket who was pointing something at the teller (I'm pretty sure it was just his finger). The bank manager was frozen in place between a potted palm and his desk, and the robber was screaming at him not to move. I was busy trying to be invisible over by the door that I had walked in from. When he left w/ the loot (the rent-a-cop security guards had NO interest in following him) the manager finally got over to his desk and pushed the alarm.

The upshot was that when I went over to the teller to make a $30 withdrawal, they said they had no money, he had taken it all. Well! I came back the next day, after peeking in the window to ck out the scene first, and closed that account. I also moved out of 'frisco. Big cities are fun, but this sort of thing I could do w/o. Thank goodness this was one of the few days I didn't have my camera slung over my shoulder. I'd hate to think what might have happened if the robber had seen me w/ that.

To the OP: how did you process the 100 foot rolls? Cut it into 20 sections that fit on standard reels (what it looks like from the picture of your darkroom, with all the reels hanging on the wall)? Or did you have some long-roll equipment not visible there?

And from the sound of it, the vast majority of those Tri-X rolls you were buying in bulk just went through the camera and then into the trash?

Duncan

frobozz said:

To the OP: how did you process the 100 foot rolls? Cut it into 20 sections that fit on standard reels (what it looks like from the picture of your darkroom, with all the reels hanging on the wall)? Or did you have some long-roll equipment not visible there?

Click to expand...

Yes. Cut into sections and processed on standard 35mm reels in 8-reel tanks. There were, of course, negatives that had been cut through the middle, but with the multiple frames from the motor drives, it never made a difference.

Long roll gear was just too expensive to get the company to go for it. I tried!

frobozz said:

And from the sound of it, the vast majority of those Tri-X rolls you were buying in bulk just went through the camera and then into the trash?

Click to expand...

Actually, carefully labeled and stored. But you are correct in that most of the film was never processed. The majority of the film was used up on "suspicion shots" taken by the tellers. However, the banks would then never see the need to have them processed and printed.

And then, there were the false alarms that ran the cameras out.

Interesting. It's always fun to chat with local cop friends about recent bank robberies. During one up the street, the robber put the cash in a
sack with a big hole in the bottom, so that when he fled on foot, all the cops had to do was follow bills on the street. In another nearby incident, an armored car robber rented the getaway car under his own name, then decided to take a nap in it only four blocks from the scene of the crime. Then there was the one where the guy wrote the holdup note on the back of one his own personalized checks. In our own neighborhood, four guys help up a jewelry store and abandoned their car on the freeway during the chase. They jumped fences and then hid behind our garbage cans. They had put all their loot in one huge green bag they could hardly carry, and were fighting over who got to keep it, essentially playing tug of war, oblivious to the fact they were surrounded by about twenty policemen with a helicopter overhead.
The folks who take this career path are more like the robbers in Raising Arizona than Ocean's Eleven.