This article originally published in Self-Service World magazine, February 2007.
Andrea McLaughlin owns Photolab in Berkely, Calif. She was an employee there when she bought out the previous owners 20 years ago. Back then, the company specialized in black-and-white prints for San Francisco's many traditional art photographers. As times changed, so did the business. Now McLaughlin finds herself owning a brand new Noritsu photo kiosk, which makes her one of the many live people who work behind the scenes in the self-service industry.
SSW: How would you describe your job?
AM: I recently heard an interview with Robin Williams, who starred in "One Hour Photo." He said after that movie a lot of people came up to him and said they worked at photo labs and told him there is a "wall of shame" in the back where they hang up people's embarrassing photos. I was really upset, because that's completely untrue.
First of all, we don't have time for anything like that.Second of all, if you look around a lab like the one at Costco, you don't see a wall somewhere with a lot of photos on it, and you would because it's all open.
The other thing is, we've already seen all the pictures. No matter what kind of pictures families take, we've seen it eight times before. No matter how bizarre it is, we've seen it before. We don't see the pictures anymore. We see the brightness and the contrast. We're looking at it from a technical point of view.
SSW: How has digital imaging changed your job?
AM: In the last 10 years, the industry has begun to really take off. Once digital cameras came in, we began to see a decline in the amount of film we were seeing. But still we see film from all over the country, mostly black and white, and more color.
It's also very hard. You probably know better than I do the number of labs that aren't in business anymore. The lab industry has been decimated by digital imaging. Kiosks are a very useful way of bringing back business. Companies with kiosks have to continue to innovate to bring people in and change the idea of what a lab is.
SSW: Have you had good results from your photo kiosk so far?
AM: We've only had our kiosk and our digital imaging equipment of the consumer sort for about six months, so as far as numbers we don't have many. Before that, we didn't do this sort of work.
I've used kiosks in various parts of the country to learn more about it. The reason I have the kiosk is that this is the only way that consumers — this plus uploading to the Internet — can see their photos before printing. How else can they see their pictures? How can they tell us what they want? This is the only way.
