Merrill-David, the last operational commercial color film lab in Cleveland, recently announced that they would no longer process E-6 color film since their processor has broken down. The recent retirement of the guy who kept this machine in working order, together with the ever diminishing volume of film coming from local commercial photographers has made it an easy decision on their part to just walk away from a business segment that has been on life-support for a few years now, with no hope of ever making a comeback. Who can blame them?

We’ve seen this coming for some time, as one commercial lab after another first raised their prices and then dropped film processing from their services altogether, as digital capture became the preferred, and for many, the only method of producing images. So where does this leave us who would like to continue shooting film for the foreseeable future?

A search of the Kodak website for processing labs that process E-6 AND black & white film AND who meet Q-Lab standards returned exactly SIX photolabs in the United States. I suppose removing the black&white processing from the search terms would increase the number significantly, but if you would like to form a relationship with a distant lab that can handle all of your processing needs, the pickings are slim.

If there is any good news in this, it would seem that as more and more local labs abandon the film processing segment of their business, it opens the door to anyone who wants to stay in the business by becoming a national niche marketer. I visited the web sites of several of the six labs that came up in my search and it seems that they are aware of this opportunity and have already begun to gear up to service customers nationwide. Prause Productions, in Rochester NY, is one that looks particularly promising. It is a family run business with a lot of expertise and has the advantage of being located close to Kodak. I’ll be sending them a few test rolls in a week or so. I’ll let you know how it comes out.