Canadian Film Lab recently celebrated a birthday – it’s been around 15 months since we moved from the UK to British Columbia, and just over 1 year since UK Film Lab became Canadian Film Lab! The birthday passed by rather quietly (and thank you to those who sent us little messages of congratulations to mark the occasion!) simply because this summer in our new home saw us have our busiest ever month in our history of running a film lab! It’s been a whirlwind but it has inspired us to sit down and look through our film processing activity going back to the first days of running UK Film Lab in a beta testing mode.
Having always had a business name referring to a specific country has in some ways been slightly misleading, because despite what our name might suggest, we have always been an international lab with a far reaching customer base. It’s something we’re proud of as well as something that we get a lot of fulfilment from – an ever changing ‘canvas’ on our scanner display screens and allowing us to tour the world from the comfort of our scanning chairs (which for the record, are not as comfortable as we would like!). Looking into our statistics, we currently enjoy receiving film from regular, loyal clients in 26 countries! TWENTY SIX! In total, we have developed, scanned and edited frame by frame….almost 1 million images. Working so closely on so much film and shooting film professionally ourselves has meant that we have amassed an ever-increasing and huge amount of knowledge on film, and we enjoy using this knowledge through the educative approach to our service with aims to help photographers improve their film shooting technique.
Despite all this, we feel that our lab still has the feel of a small, family run business. When we set out to run a film lab we wanted to offer the very highest quality in film processing but with a personal feel, and these two things are what guide us every single day. Where some say ‘it’s not personal, it’s just business’, to us it IS personal and we hope this comes across to you as our customers. When we were in our beta testing mode of UK Film Lab we remember remarking to one of our beta testers that we treat every single frame as if it’s our own, and that really holds true for how we work. So that just leaves us to say a big, heartfelt thank you to all of you who entrust your film in our hands.
