MISSOULA — Photography is the art of seeing, but you might have to look a bit beyond your normal focal length to find Missoula's only camera shop, The Dark Room.
The shop sits in a basement on Missoula's Main Street.
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"When digital was really coming in, people were saying film is gonna die, film's dead, they'll never see it, and I said, well," owner Michael Patterson said.
The shop has been helping customers create memorable moments since 1978, when it was founded by a man originally hailing from Colorado.
"It started out on Third Street near where the Good Food Store is now. I started working there in '95 and I bought it in 2006," Patterson explained.
When digital photography started to overtake film, the store didn't shutter even though prices of cameras and rolls dropped.
Now, post-pandemic, The Dark Room is seeing more rolls of 35 millimeter film than ever before.
"While people were shut down, they got into hobbies, they went through their houses, found their old cameras," Patterson said. "We're doing probably 3 times the amount of film we were doing 10 years ago."
While Patterson runs the shop, a couple develops and scans the film that people drop off or send in.
"Tim goes in there to open the things up in the complete darkness, so by feel he loads the reels, puts it into the developing tanks, and goes through the process," Patterson explained.
"Tine, who works for me, she can crank through 15 to 20 [rolls], depending on what condition they're in," Patterson added.
Black and white rolls are done in-house; however, color is shipped to a partner in Coeur d'Alene. When the rolls come back, they are then touched up by The Dark Room crew.
"You see some great travel pictures that I actually love. If there's like cute dogs and cats, we're all like going gaga over those," Patterson detailed.
As for keeping a business afloat on what was once a dying art form, Patterson says he wouldn't have it any other way.
"I said that will never go away and it's actually a little surprising just how much it has come back," Patterson stated.
