I know, I know—every generation thinks they were at the percent juxtaposition of social or technological change. And I know I've already written about the beauty of where on the timeline of technology my teenage years fell. But this is different. This was university.
On the same site as the CD store, the last bastion of Rooster Town, was my place of work for five years: a (relatively) small photography store that was part of a (relatively) large national chain. I started there in 2002, at the age of 19, in the summer after my first year of university. (The fact that my first year of university was 2001-02 might be another essay, another day.) I had some experience with phjotography in a casual social sense, being the one friend with a camera and accompanying film. That's how long ago this started, and why the era I worked there is so significant.
My store, when I started, only sold compact film cameras. They were a hundred to a couple hundred bucks, with autofocus, auto flash, and a modest zoom. Pentax was my preferred brand, but we had some popular Olympus models as well. Remember those brands? There's a good chance you don't, but they were big names once, especially in these compact ones. All 35mm cameras, nothing fancy. The quality was more in the film than the camera itself, at least when it came to these.
This is why we didn't make most of our money on hardware. As a smaller store clolser to residences of families with enough money for hobbies, we did more basic photofinishing than anything else. We could print up to 8x12, process C-41 film (colour negatives and some black and white) with basic colour correction by the subjective eye of the lab tech. That's what made the difference between us and cheaper labs in broader stores, or so we claimed.
But, as anyone who's shopped for a camera in the last 20 years knows, this all changed. Slowly at first, with some people insisting on the superiority of film (some so aggressively I'm sure they still make that claim with curmudgeonous age), and with Corporate waiting a while to put digital cameras and printing capabilities in smaller stores.
One element of the need for change can actually be attributed (indirectly) to 9/11, oddly enough. As the War on Terror thereafter waged changed security measures in international travel, a) more people needed passports (to go to the US, or for their kids to travel with them with passports of their own), and b) the photo requirements became more stringent. No shadows, no smiles, no glasses. Yeah, that'll stop those terrorists! At first we used a dual lens Polaroid camera to take two (slightly different, thanks to a little thing called lens parallax) photos at once, and cut them to size. New ones needed very specific head sizes and placement within the picture, which we tried to accomplish with the Polaroid shots but became a crapshoot and waste of resources with the failure rate since we couldn't adjust it after the photo was taken. We needed a tool to manipulate placement and size, and digital printing was the only way.
As our store upgarded its printing machines to read memory cards and CDs (I honestly can't recall if USB drives were there when I started—that's just how far back this is) we started selling cameras to take these photos too. The quality of the retail selection at the time was such that 1 megapixel models—not of sufficient size photo for even a 4x6 print without visible pixelation—were barely on their way out. We sold the range of 2 MP, 3 MP, and 4 MP cameras that cost hundreds more than the film cameras in the same cabinet. Anything past that was too fancy for us, though we could of course advise customers to go to a bigger store in a bigger mall for bigger features at a bigger price. I recall my first digital camera, the 4 MP Canon A80 with its swivel screen for selfie previews, directly from the manufacturer for significantly less (a little benefit of this job aside from half price photofinishing). Digital SLRs were not sold anywhere until a few years itno my photo retail career, and never at my location. I bought my fancy dSLR, the Nikon D70s, from the manufacturer as well, a 6 MP camera for $1100 after discount.
It was fascinating to see the change in how people approached the process of printing photographs. On rolls of film, the people dropping them off knew they were a bit of a mystery. They trusted us in being the first eyes to see what developed as we fed the finished negatives into our machines. They trusted us that nothing would go wrong with the chemical process or to the physical celluloid material rolled up into that iconic canister. (I wonder if younger people could even recognize what that is, the way they can't recognize the floppy disk shape of the save icon anymore.) With digital photos, they already knew what they would look like, more or less, and depended on us to make them look a little bit better with basic colour correction. The trust came from how the pixels on the tiny screen of their device really looked in larger size on an analogue surface. Some of the customers would still open their envelope in store, look at the photos, and squint at them to make sure they met stringent standards. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't. The technology didn't make that part of the job very much easier, as suburban customers still acted the way suburban customers do.
Digital printing replaced many other mini-labs in supermarkets and department stores, and the race to keep on top of the convenience meant the ways we could take in orders was always changing. We would give away free CDs for people to install on their home computers through which (assuming internet connectivity) they could send to us. Yes, physical CDs to install a specific program just for us. This was a short-lived method, being replaced by directly submitting photos via website...however slowly, on the modems at the time. For many people it was still worth the effort of physically getting up and coming to the store and using a kiosk there to select the photos and get them sent to our lab at faster than a tortoise's pace. Theoretically the kiosk was self-serving, but we, as sales associates, needed to train hundreds of customers of a wide range of demographics on how to use it. Almost every shift would've had at least one temptation to shove a technically unsavvy client out of the way and select all the photos on the touchscreen for them instead of watch them awkwardly hover their fingers over the icon they need to press before they press the wrong one. Patience isn't a virtue so much as a skill, and developing that skill in this time and place has helped me throughout my career in other fields.
This change in technology and trends in consumer capitalism, though, couldn't come close to matching the impact of the social element of the job. The fondness for specific people and what they added to my life, the memorable life events or unusual occurrences that centered around that physical space, or the silly games we played in slow times when we could get away with it—these were such important parts of forming my attitude towards work and human relationships in ways that defy the purpose of profit, which was my spiteful ethos in those rebellious years. I was a sociology student at the time of working there, after all, and I shared my critical commentary with coworkers who weren't taking the same courses, just to make sure the ideas spread. What was significant about living through this and nostalgic to look back on isn't so much the technology itself, but having concrete memories of the social implications and the ways we had to adapt. I don't think my era is culturally superior at all based on this, or that having worked in the field both before and after the change gives me better skills or greater character. It's just a rich context, one that I choose to embrace and take ownership of and share with others. We all see things transform in front of us in one way or another, and such memories are worth preserving, whether digital or film.