How Dale Farkas Built a Photo Lab that Endured for 50 Years

A photo lab is a lot more than chemistry, scanners, and printers. It’s a discipline. In this episode of the Dead Pixels Society podcast, we are joined by Dale Farkas of Dale Laboratories in Hollywood, Florida. He lays out the principle that quietly separates labs that last from labs that fade: the difference between quality and quality control. Great prints are not an accident, and consistency is not a “nice to have” when your customers are trusting you with once-in-a-lifetime images.

Farkas traces his path from RIT and motion-picture lab work to a true garage-style start, then into rapid growth when he spots a market vacuum and commits to serving it. Along the way, he explains how labs shifted from optical printing to digital printing, why technician judgment still matters for color correction, and what it takes to run a modern workflow that stays predictable under load. If you care about film processing, mail-in film developing, professional photo prints, and the real-world mechanics behind lab reliability, this conversation is packed with practical insight.

The discussion also addresses industry pressure points: silver halide photo paper supply, Fuji paper choices, inkjet durability, and why customers respond to a print’s “wow factor” even when they can’t name the technical reason. Farkas closes with an open invitation to buyers interested in a turnkey photo lab operation and what the next chapter looks like for him.

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Transcript

Erin Manning 0:01

Welcome to the Dead Pixel Society podcast, the photoimaging industry's leading. Welcome to the Dead Pixel Society Podcast, the photoimaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau.

Gary Pageau 0:20

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixel Society Podcast. I'm your host, Gary Peugeot, and today we're joined by Dale Farkas, who operates the legendary Dale Laboratories in Hollywood, Florida, one of the longstanding film and digital labs in the industry. And it's an honor and a pleasure to welcome Dale to the show. Hi, Dale. How are you today? Fine. Thank you for the invitation. Before we get into like the history of the company and you know how you started and where you see some of the direction going, you've always has an affinity towards how things should properly be done, you know, what you call process, you know, having your processes down, which I think is reflected in the success of Dale Laboratories. Where did that come from? Where did you learn that from?

Dale Farkas 1:10

Well, I went to RIT and my first this Rochester Institute of Technology, which most of your listeners are probably familiar with in photographic science. And our first course was really in material and processes. And the first thing we really learned was the difference between quality and quality control. Right. And this is kind of something that a lot of people aren't aware of. I'll give you an example. You can go any place in the United States and have a McDonald's hamburger, and it will be pretty much identical. Right. You may or may not think it's a great hamburger. That's the case of quality. But in terms of quality control and consistency, McDonald's has it. What you want to have in a photographic laboratory is both. You want both high quality that serves your particular photographers' needs, and you want consistency. And that's why having companies like Kodak providing quality control systems is really very, very useful. And what a photographic laboratory today is, is a situation where we essentially feeding robotic printers, right? Digital information from data. Right. And it's relational data databases. I don't want to get wonky on this, but essentially it means just the way the same way you can drive a car. You don't have to know what's going on in the engine. You just need your steering wheel, your accelerator, and either fill it up with gas or electricity. Sure. And then as an operator, you can work. Now, our technicians are able to do that. So what they provide is color balancing experience where they visually correct every image. Right. So if you control the variables and the process, and if you control the input, you can get the quality. And then the final check is quality control where you check what comes out.

Gary Pageau 3:19

So let's go back a little bit to what you were saying about Kodak's position in the industry back then. Obviously, Eastman Kodak Company was the largest company in the industry. And of course, based in Rochester, New York. So of course they had very close ties with RIT at the time, you know, providing the graphic arts and the photography programs with a lot of oversight. You know, they really had to provide to the industry the information to process film as an independent, right? Because of the consent decree and a bunch of other things. At what point did you say, listen, I want to start my own thing? I want to take what I've learned and start my own laboratory.

Dale Farkas 3:52

Well, that happened by accident. Uh we've all heard the expression ready, aim, fire.

Gary Pageau 3:58

Right, yeah, yeah.

Dale Farkas 3:59

My life is usually conducted ready, fire, aim. Right. Something comes up, I get some breadcrumbs, and I just react to it. So the way the laboratory started was on a wing and a dare. Right. I was hired out of RIT to be a supervisor in the third largest motion picture lab in the United States. The company was called Movie Lab.

Gary Pageau 4:24

Okay.

Dale Farkas 4:25

And I ended up in charge of customer complaints and troubleshooting, which is kind of what I trained in. I had one of my assistants, who was a man that was 10 years older than me, whose name was Gus. And Gus was one of these people who in life was never satisfied with his lot. And somebody had always done him wrong. Right. I used to always come back at Gus whenever he complained to me about this being wrong or that being wrong. And kind of woe is me kind of thing.

Gary Pageau 4:57

Yeah. Yeah.

Dale Farkas 4:58

I'd say, Gus, you know, this is America. Anybody in America can go out, start his own business, and become a millionaire. That's the American dream. And he'd fall a little bit and say, that's not true. Well, one day Gus got his revenge. I was standing in the hallway at the laboratory, and a couple of fellows came to me and showed me an ad from a company in the West Coast in California that advertised that they were putting making slides on motion picture film. Right. And they asked me how they were doing it. So I took a look at the ad, and I obviously knew everything about how motion picture prints are made in a motion picture lab. And I said, Well, this is what they're doing. And they said, Well, what do you think of the idea?

Gary Pageau 5:47

Right.

Dale Farkas 5:47

Well, they have a great idea, but they're going about it all the wrong way. I explained to them what they were doing. And these guys were a bunch of hippies, apparently. And they took out two-page spreads in popular photography and spent all their time just putting down their customers, which is not my way of doing things, nor yours, nor most of your people who were watching this.

Gary Pageau 6:12

Right.

Dale Farkas 6:13

So, guest quip, quell-wise guy, why don't you do it yourself? You got me on that one, right? Right. Yeah. Well, my wife had been a school teacher. We had a child at home. We'd lost half our family income. And I figured, what the heck? Why not do this ourselves? Because the deal was people would write in and they would uh get or telephone and get two rolls of spooled motion picture film in 35 millimeter cassettes, and then it would come through. So the idea was that I would basically process the film in the laboratory. I'd splice the rolls that came back, did it in my mother's basement. Right. This is literally one of those starting in a garage type stories.

Gary Pageau 6:56

Yeah, exactly. So many people have done that. Yeah.

Dale Farkas 6:59

And then I'd take it to the motion picture lab, process the rolls, get the color positive, and my wife would mount the uh slides, the individual frames into slides.

Gary Pageau 7:10

Right.

Dale Farkas 7:10

And that was all well and good until the business got out of control and we got so busy I had to quit my job at the lab.

Gary Pageau 7:17

Of course, by then you had lost access to the processing equipment, right?

Dale Farkas 7:21

Absolutely. I I I was SOL. Okay. No place to go. But I had a good reputation in the industry. So I went to Technicolor and said, Would you do it? And it turned out that my first boss, the first lab manager, was the lab manager at that point at the Technicolor Lab in New York City.

Gary Pageau 7:42

Right.

Dale Farkas 7:42

So he said, sure, we'll do it. Well, they did it one night, and they said, This is too labor-intensive for us for what we're getting.

Gary Pageau 7:50

Right.

Dale Farkas 7:50

If you see this fellow, he's got a video analyzer. And if you can video analyze the roles and submit them to us, we'll do it.

Gary Pageau 7:58

Right.

Dale Farkas 7:59

It turned out that was my first supervisor who owned that other company that was submitting to technical. I mean, this is where our relationships in the business all work out. Exactly. So he said, sure, we'll do it. Right. So he and his partner did it one night and said, This is too labor intensive. You're going to have to do the video analysis yourself.

Gary Pageau 8:21

Right.

Dale Farkas 8:21

Now, video analysis at the time used hazeltine analyzers.

Gary Pageau 8:25

Yeah.

Dale Farkas 8:26

And it was a two-year apprenticeship. Right. I had twenty I had 20 minutes.

Gary Pageau 8:32

You had a lot of the the expertise at the time coming in from obvious MRAT. You kind of knew a lot of the stuff probably instinctively.

Dale Farkas 8:39

I knew color theory. I knew motion pictures. I knew all this stuff, but I'd never done it. I was a supervisor. Right. Yeah, yeah. That was that was uh a different story. So that was all well and good. And then you asked how we ended up in a warm weather climate.

Gary Pageau 8:54

Right. Yeah.

Dale Farkas 8:55

Well, I would go in and use these fellas' equipment for oh the first couple hours. I'd I'd arrive at seven o'clock in the morning, use it until nine o'clock when they arrived.

Gary Pageau 9:07

Yeah.

Dale Farkas 9:07

Then they'd kick me off and I'd be out. And one day I drove my car into town and it turned into a towway zone at eight o'clock in the morning. I was down there at 8 01 and my car was gone. Oh gosh. So I took my last 75 bucks from my wallet, went down and bailed my car out, went home like a raging idiot, and told my wife that in two weeks we were out of there. And she said, Where are we going? I said, Well, we're going to Florida. And that's how we ended up in Hollywood because they were the only municipality that had proper water control. Okay. So that's a short story made long.

Gary Pageau 9:48

Well, no, that's a great story. I love that those kind of stories from especially people in the industry who start their own thing and always start small and then grow. For those who don't remember, movie film was very different than the color negative film that most people were used to, you know, and there was other people, Seattle Filmworks or whatever. But you didn't stay in that business. I mean, you had that for a long time, but you also started processing other stuff, right?

Dale Farkas 10:11

Yeah, well, here was the key to it. If you step into a vacuum in business, the money just comes pouring in. It's like a Vita where the money starts pouring in.

Gary Pageau 10:22

Right.

Dale Farkas 10:22

So using this model of giving out free film, and the film could not be processed by Qualix or anybody else in the industry because it had a carbon back, it would muck up their processing machines.

Gary Pageau 10:35

Right.

Dale Farkas 10:36

We had two years to grow. So in less than two years, I had 50 employees.

Gary Pageau 10:41

Right.

Dale Farkas 10:42

I'd made custom equipment up where we could print it. And then we started correcting the color of every single frame, color and density. So these were goofed slides. Then we started making prints. And then I said, Well, why don't we just process, in addition to motion picture, regular C41 films?

Gary Pageau 11:03

Right. Yeah, yeah.

Dale Farkas 11:04

And that's what we did. Yeah. And then the digital age came, and again we had to modify. Right. Yeah.

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Gary Pageau 11:14

Most of your people have gone through a lot of this. Exactly. Exactly. Because they sort of went from that either black and white or chrome period, and then you get into color negative, and then you get into print output at some point, then you kind of transition to digital. And you've been through all that. So, what was the thing that you think contributed to the longevity of your business? Because you've been around 50 years, and that's a long time for a single ownership business to be in place.

Dale Farkas 12:10

Largely adaptability, adaptability and working with people by the golden rule. I know that sounds kind of trite, but PMA was a huge, huge influence in everything I did. I used to go to all the conventions. Right. And one night they had a session with Zig Ziegler. Right. And Zig Ziglar was a motivational speaker who started out selling pots and pans from a poor family that could barely eat in East Texas, I think it was. And he gave me the key to wealth and prosperity.

Gary Pageau 12:47

Right.

Dale Farkas 12:47

Which is you can have anything you want in life, providing you help enough other people get what they want.

Gary Pageau 12:53

Right.

Dale Farkas 12:53

And that's largely how we run our business. And it doesn't make any difference whether or not it's professional photographers who need top quality prints.

Gary Pageau 13:03

Right.

Dale Farkas 13:04

Or a grandmother who's digitally challenged. Yesterday we had a bunch of kids from a local school who had a photo project. Right. And they didn't know how to crop properly. Right. So they submitted orders to us for their class project. Needless to say, all of them came out wrong. Right. We went out, we recropped all their images and gave them their prints.

Gary Pageau 13:29

Right.

Dale Farkas 13:29

That makes it a less than profitable project. But the point is that these are kids, their families, and others who will become customers. You simply adapt to reality and never forget you're there to serve the customer.

Gary Pageau 13:44

It sounds very basic, but it seems like there's always people in the marketplace who are always trying to find ways around that, right? Can we take out people in a process and just have everything be automated, do everything online? And it's like, you know, use AI chatbots or whatever. And it seems like actually, if you want to actually grow in this in any business, you need to kind of lean into relationships. You need to lean into because guess what? Human beings are what buy stuff.

Dale Farkas 14:12

Absolutely. You're right on the money. And the other thing you always have to remember in a business is every customer base is going to have attrition.

Gary Pageau 14:21

Right.

Dale Farkas 14:22

You're going to lose a certain number of customers. People die, people lose interest. Sure. My father owned a butcher shop, and he had a very interesting low-tech approach when he ended up seeing business dropping off. I don't know if you remember those black with the white speckled notebooks that we had in elementary school. Oh, yeah, absolutely. He had one that was dog-eared and ragged, and he had all of his customers written down. So when business got slow, he pull out his notebook, look for a customer who hadn't ordered for a while, and telephone her. Ask about her kids, ask about her life and reach out. Now we do this today with online marketing digitally. Sure, absolutely. But the concept hasn't changed. Right. It's simply reaching out, telling people we're here. Right. I don't know what percentage of your listeners, viewers, actually use newsletters. But that's effectively the only way we we advertise. Yeah. Just newsletters.

Gary Pageau 15:31

Yeah. Because you used to, I remember you used to do a lot of like ads, and you were big into mailers and and that sort of thing. Like you said, I'm you know, it's funny you mentioned like popular photography because there was popular photography, there's modern photography, there was a bunch of photo publications like that that was really the only way for people to reach avid photographers, right? People who were hobbyists and whatnot. Now it's much easier to target people, but to like you said, it's it's I think it's hit or miss, right? I think it's you know, I think people have so much advertising in their in their world that they kind of don't even see a lot of it, which is why a thing like a newsletter is probably more appropriate for reaching your key customers.

Dale Farkas 16:11

Well, the idea is you you provide a benefit at the beginning of the newsletter. Right. The benefit shouldn't be cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. If you're just in a race to the bottom, you're not accomplishing much. Right. And quite honestly, if you give a sale, 90% of the people who order will not actually take advantage of the sale. It seems counterintuitive. Yeah, I was gonna say my head kind of tilted on that one. What?

Gary Pageau 16:40

Okay.

Dale Farkas 16:41

It doesn't work.

Gary Pageau 16:43

Right.

Dale Farkas 16:44

Ask anybody who's in business, they know they can give a sale, and very few people actually take them up on it.

Gary Pageau 16:49

Right.

Dale Farkas 16:50

But those same people are receiving the message how we're here, how we can serve your your needs. So generally, I will start my newsletters with a value proposition. Right. I'll give people tips on how to take pictures in the snow. Right. Not necessarily good for a local people. It's certainly appropriate now. So we send it out in a timely way. Uh something on cruise photography.

Gary Pageau 17:22

Right. Yeah.

Dale Farkas 17:23

How to take pictures on cruise ships. Whatever's involved in my life and I find interesting, I try to just share with other people. Yeah. And that's essentially it.

Gary Pageau 17:32

So let's talk a little bit about kind of the adaptability that you've had to accomplish within your own environment, right? Because, like again, you started with the big Cine processors and you transferred and other things, but you're still doing film. You're still, you know, then you transition from optical printing to digital printing. What was that like? Because you know, you said you said to me in the past that your your son has been involved in that transition from the optical to digital printing. What was that like?

Dale Farkas 17:59

Well, we got a very, very strange invitation from Kodak around just the past 2000, maybe 2003.

Gary Pageau 18:08

Yeah, yeah.

Dale Farkas 18:09

Kodak was trying to come up with a digital printer, right? Develop a digital printer with some programs that they had that were fabulous. And they were trying to hold on to the film business as long as possible. Sure. Do you remember they came out with APS as a format?

Gary Pageau 18:27

Yeah, and Photo CD was the same idea. Let's keep film as a capture medium.

Dale Farkas 18:32

Absolutely. Analog capture, digital output. And actually, it was a wonderful idea, but it wasn't enough to stop the tsunami that ended up really hurting them so badly until they readjusted. And so they invited five companies up, and we were the only laboratory of any size. There was mini lab, there were camera dealers, and there were others. And their thought was they were going to try to develop with Gray Tag a machine that could go into drugstores and camera stores that would allow for film processing and printing in one small unit. Sure. And it didn't work out all the way they thought.

Gary Pageau 19:36

Right.

Dale Farkas 19:38

And within six months, they had actually changed direction based upon the input that we had. I had also recommended to them that they go in two directions instead of one. Right. Not just with Greytag, with whom we had a wonderful relationship, but with Narita. So that they'd have two different directions for their software.

Gary Pageau 20:00

Right.

Dale Farkas 20:01

And then everything went well. They got the printers online ready to go. Right. They only had one problem. They hadn't sold any of these printers and they didn't have a market for them. Right. So it was sort of like The Godfather. They gave me an offer I couldn't refuse and gave me 24 hours. The offer was that I could become the Kodak C processing laboratory. This was a special process that would convert underwater photographs that have a lack of light. Usually would come cyan blue muck. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I could do this under the Kodak banner. Right.

Gary Pageau 20:41

So for all the people who were shooting uh scuba and dive pictures and things like that, which of course, you know, was a big niche market, right? Because that was people weren't going to go digital for that. That was totally inappropriate at that time. Nikat had a wonderful underwater film camera.

Dale Farkas 20:58

Oh, yeah. The Nikono series was great. Nikono series, and that was big. So it was a whole different direction to go beyond our amateur photographers and our professional photographers. And we went in that direction. And what I had to do was pay out $130,000 for a printing machine.

Gary Pageau 21:18

Right.

Dale Farkas 21:19

And then develop film mailers, design them for a mail order business, and then figure out how to service 20 different dive shops. Right. And they gave me all of a month to do it. So again, it was ready, fire, aim. Right. That's been the story of my life. It's adaptability.

Gary Pageau 21:41

Yeah. But it seems to me like, you know, you realize there was probably, if you were going to have a relative exclusive on that, it was going to be, you know, a good opportunity if you could make it happen.

Dale Farkas 21:52

It gave us the excuse, the reason, and the economic rationale to get into digital printing. It wasn't that the naritsu optical printers weren't great.

Gary Pageau 22:03

Right.

Dale Farkas 22:04

We started out with Kodak S printers, and there you'd have to test and retest and finally print because there was good but no cigar. Right. The Narutsu printers, you could scan a frame and have a perfectly color balanced print come out the other end of the machines. Right. So the idea of doing that with digital was great. And then Coda did Amazing work, and they came up with Kodak DP2.

Gary Pageau 22:33

Right.

Dale Farkas 22:33

DP2 is a quick explanation for listeners, is a relational database program that permits digital scanned information to go into a printing system and be translated in a way that produces optimum color on prints.

Gary Pageau 22:50

Right, right, right.

Dale Farkas 22:51

Think of that as a Corvette, right?

Gary Pageau 22:53

Yeah.

Dale Farkas 22:54

But you have to give your customers a steering wheel and the accelerator. And with that, we went to SoftWork Systems, and SoftWork Systems has a program called Rose, R-O-E-S, Remote Order Entry System, and that provided the user interface.

Gary Pageau 23:14

Yeah.

Dale Farkas 23:14

And then we have several other user interfaces for different customer groups.

Gary Pageau 23:19

Yep. I just saw the Rose folks a couple weeks ago. They're still around. I don't know. DP2 is kind of not readily available anymore, but Rose is still around.

Dale Farkas 23:28

Well, there are only 30 labs in the c in the world, actually, that have a combination of Rose and DP2.

Gary Pageau 23:34

Yeah.

Dale Farkas 23:35

Miller's, uh, Bay Photo, all the larger ones all have that. And that that's kind of the key to the combination of quality control and quality and having a smooth through flow through of work.

Gary Pageau 23:52

Right. Yeah, yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the the reputation that Dale Laboratories has over the years. There's always been a you know a stellar reputation among your customers. You've clearly solved the you know process piece and some of those things. But so so what has been the the key to longevity and success in that market to keep your reputation?

Dale Farkas 24:18

It's constantly staying on task and never forgetting that the customer, if not right, you know, the rule of thumb is rule number one, the customer is always right.

Gary Pageau 24:29

Right.

Dale Farkas 24:30

And then rule number two, if in doubt, go back to rule number one. Right. That's what we did with these kids yesterday from the school. That doesn't change. Just treat people properly, honestly, and do the same with everyone you deal with, and you're fine.

Gary Pageau 24:46

And and also you got to recognize that there are different people, you know, there are different customer groups that have different needs, right? I mean, you're not serving just one type of photographer, you're serving a bunch of different flags from you know pros to amateurs to advanced hobbyists to all those kind of people. And they're all gonna have you have to respond to each of those kind of differently.

Dale Farkas 25:06

Well, the other thing to understand is that a business needs to always underpromise and over-deliver.

Gary Pageau 25:13

Right.

Dale Farkas 25:14

If it wants to be long-lived.

Gary Pageau 25:16

Right.

Dale Farkas 25:18

An example of that is there are two levels of photographic paper.

Gary Pageau 25:22

Right.

Dale Farkas 25:22

You have consumer paper, which is Fuji Crystal Archive, right, and then you have their professional papers.

Gary Pageau 25:29

Right.

Dale Farkas 25:29

The professional papers cost 30% more.

Gary Pageau 25:32

Right.

Dale Farkas 25:33

But we print primarily on everything other than proofing, we print on the professional papers.

Gary Pageau 25:40

Right.

Dale Farkas 25:40

And there's a very, very real difference in quality. You get what you pay for. Is that something I can really explain to my customers?

Gary Pageau 25:49

Not really, but they know when they receive the when you're trying to demonstrate the advantages of a of the higher-end Fuji paper, how do you do that? How do you talk to customers about that? That it's really worth that much more.

Dale Farkas 26:04

It's difficult, but the main thing to do is when they look at their prints, they say, wow, it's the wow factor that counts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because there really is a big difference between the two papers in the blacks and the saturation of the colors.

Gary Pageau 26:21

Right.

Dale Farkas 26:21

But they've developed a wonderful, absolutely wonderful brand name for their consumer paper. Now, Kodak had their royal paper, which was very similar. Yeah. The challenge that a lot of labs write now, and we hadn't discussed this earlier, is going to be on whether or not with silver halide paper.

Gary Pageau 26:42

Right. Yeah.

Dale Farkas 26:43

Because we're all aware that the price of silver and gold is going through the roof.

Gary Pageau 26:47

Yeah.

Dale Farkas 26:48

And we only have one manufacturer of paper in the world now, and that's coming out of Europe. Right. That's Fuji paper.

Gary Pageau 26:56

Right.

Dale Farkas 26:57

So inkjet is being used in drugstores now, and inkjet looks fine. The problem with inkjet paper with G-clay printing is that it's not physically durable. Right. It scratches really, really easily. Yeah. Where photographic paper, a photographic sheet, an 8x10, is good for a hundred years.

Gary Pageau 27:19

Right.

Dale Farkas 27:20

And you can put your fingers on it. You can do anything else with it.

Gary Pageau 27:23

Right.

Dale Farkas 27:24

So maybe for future podcasts, you may want to have some of the labs and some photographers discuss how they feel about silver halight paper.

Gary Pageau 27:34

Yeah, it's definitely something that's happening. I know there's a lot of work being done for like laminated coatings and things like that to kind of give that real photographic feel to an inkjet or a toner-based print. And, you know, and I think the people who do dice up prints are also doing some of that, right? There's laminated coatings people are trying to put on those too. So definitely there, there's a there's a feel. And I think that's more of a technological challenge than a than a break, than a market break. If the market's there, I think the manufacturers will definitely try and make that happen. But you know, until then, so many people are are just thrilled with silver halide. I know some of the labs just are just you know, they hope to get 10 more years out of it as a platform.

Dale Farkas 28:16

Well, hopefully, and that's dependent upon Fuji continuing to provide paper or a Kodak resurrecting itself. And understand that Kodak, Eastman Kodak is not dead. They're producing most all the film in the world now.

Gary Pageau 28:31

Yeah. Yeah.

Dale Farkas 28:32

Hopefully, I'm not speaking out of school, but uh Kodak is producing film under the Fuji name.

Gary Pageau 28:37

Oh, yeah, everyone, yeah. That's an open secret.

Dale Farkas 28:41

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, well, the question I guess they have is whether or not they want to get back into what's a decreasing market.

Gary Pageau 28:50

Right.

Dale Farkas 28:51

And from what I understand, Fuji moved their manufacturing out of the States to Europe, right? Not because they didn't have huge capacity here, right, but rather because the equipment they had in Europe allowed them more flexibility of producing multiple cuts on the same machine.

Gary Pageau 29:10

Yeah.

Dale Farkas 29:11

And they're they're a wonderful company to deal with.

Gary Pageau 29:14

Yeah.

Dale Farkas 29:14

So are the people at remember Kodak DP2 is still comp is still part of Kodak. It may be a separately named company, yeah, yeah, but they're still providing the technology that allows us and other major pro labs uh to produce their work.

Gary Pageau 29:33

You're obviously very bullish about the industry, right? Even though you've been in having you know 50 years of success and are looking for the future, but you're looking to transition beyond owning the companies. Can you talk a little bit about what you're looking to do to transition the company to another owner or an ownership group?

Dale Farkas 29:53

Well, I'd like to find one. I'm writing a book. If you look at my picture now, the question people might ask is does this look like an 80-year-old fella? Right. Actually, I'm 81 going in 82. There you go. And we all have biological clocks. I'd like to spend the next few years of my life doing something else. And I've in the final stages of writing a book called Reverse Aging, 100 Days to a Younger You. And that book describes process control. Strangely enough, I mean process control in film, but process control also works with the aging process. So it's possible, and they have it in the blue zones where it's exhibited, to take the right mix of lifestyle and chemistry and literally push back the age, the biological age you have, so that I may be over 80, but I function at a 65-year-old level.

Gary Pageau 30:53

Right.

Dale Farkas 30:53

Start my day with 100 push-ups, 60 leg lifts, whatever.

Gary Pageau 30:57

Right.

Dale Farkas 30:57

And that's what I'd like to move to. Now, for somebody to that really is into and loves photography, I can't think of a better turnkey operation than mine because we have all the intellectual software, we have the location, we have a trained staff, and the full capability of actually starting a you couldn't start a photographic laboratory today at my level. Right. It would be virtually impossible. Even the permitting is difficult. Yeah. Environmental problems. So I'm open to anybody that wants to call and transition. Ideally, it's a person or a company that has really good marketing capabilities.

Gary Pageau 31:48

Right.

Dale Farkas 31:49

As it should be obvious, I'm an engineer, I'm not a marketing guy. I've seen your webpage. Right. It's it leaves much to be desired. If a heads-up company could be out there and actually market our company well, it's like a rocket waiting to take off. And I have a dedicated staff of people ready to do it, the equipment's in place, and the lifestyle. I mean, people may like to get up to zero degree temperatures, but I can walk out, walk my dog, and it's nice to have the sun uh in my face. At least not so much in July. Right, exactly. At least in February. So that's it. So if anybody wants to discuss this with me, my number's 954-536-4290. And the other possibility is a company that wants to move laterally. Let's say they have a studio and it's a large studio and they'd like to bring their production in-house.

Gary Pageau 32:52

Right.

Dale Farkas 32:52

This is a great way to do it. And then have the other business, regular business doing, as an offset to create a profitable business model.

Gary Pageau 33:02

Yeah.

Dale Farkas 33:03

And that's it. So thank you for asking the question.

Gary Pageau 33:06

No, I appreciate it. No, and the reason why we're reconnected is I saw you posted on LinkedIn that you were looking for a buyer for this, you know, well-regarded, I would say almost legendary business in the uh film and digital printing process. And it was just interesting, as we got to talk about it, that there's a lot of people right now who are either looking to sell or looking to pass the business on. And you're kind of taken from a standpoint of people are not only not just buying the past, but they're buying a potential for the future too, that there is future opportunity in the printing business that are probably that's probably been untapped.

Dale Farkas 33:41

Yeah. And by the way, this is a very, very common problem that I'm looking at. Many of us who have been successful, economically successful in life, have passed the ability on to our children where they can also be successful, but do it in their own right. Right. And so many businesses have young people, these sons and daughters of owners who just simply aren't interested in the business.

Gary Pageau 34:11

Right.

Dale Farkas 34:12

Yeah. I mean, my son was raised, he when he went into RIT, he put down that photography was the second language in our house. Right.

Gary Pageau 34:21

Yeah, exactly.

Dale Farkas 34:22

He was raised with it.

Gary Pageau 34:23

Yeah.

Dale Farkas 34:24

But he he owns Lyka Store in Miami now, and he's following his dreams. He takes avid photographers on tours around the world and brings up to their level of photography, selling the best cameras out there, like as I mean, like as a Rolls-Royce to other Lincolns and Cadillacs. Yeah.

Gary Pageau 34:46

And the people who have Leica's like to go on trips and have that community, and he's built a business around that. That's a whole nother story.

Dale Farkas 34:53

And most of them all they most of all they have the Doray Me. Exactly. Exactly. They're affluent people who will collect. These people will turn in a camera with a thousand activations so they can get the newer model and spend ten thousand dollars to do it.

Gary Pageau 35:09

Yeah, it's it's a whole nother market. Whereas again, you started out with people who want to start out with a free roll of film and get some processing. So it's a whole different world, I think.

Dale Farkas 35:19

There are so many different markets and so many different ways. And we're so fortunate to be in this country where literally the way I told Gus, anybody who's got the luck and pluck and is willing to put in the perseverance can earn themselves a very, very nice, comfortable lifestyle. And just the ability to get in my car and do what I love to do as a hobby. I mean, I started at the age of 12. My first thrill was seeing a black and white print appear on a sheet of paper and a developing track.

Gary Pageau 35:54

Right.

Dale Farkas 35:55

After that, I was hooked.

Gary Pageau 35:56

Right.

Dale Farkas 35:57

Photography is an addiction.

Gary Pageau 35:59

It's definitely a passion for a lot of people. It's a passion for a lot of people, that's for sure. Absolutely.

Dale Farkas 36:04

And it still is for me.

Gary Pageau 36:06

Well, thank you, Dale. It's been great to talk to you. I appreciate it. Again, where can people go to find out more about Dale Labs and the opportunity? You gave out your phone number, but is there a website set up to inquire on the on the on the opportunity?

Dale Farkas 36:23

Oh, as far as the opportunity, my phone number, I'll give you my email address. It's Dale Farkas, D-A-L-E, F-A-R-K-A-S at Comcast.net. Okay. If somebody wants to see the unique way we handle film processing, go to site bestfilmdeveloping.com and it shows a whole new way of bringing in mail order film to a laboratory.

Gary Pageau 36:52

Okay.

Dale Farkas 36:53

That also never checked out. So there's Dale Labs.

Gary Pageau 36:57

Yeah.

Dale Farkas 36:58

And Best Film Processing. Dale Labs.com and Best Film Processing. Awesome. The two sites. The one final thought is that we've changed from an area where everyone wants prints to with film, they're going to analog capture on film.

Gary Pageau 37:19

Right.

Dale Farkas 37:20

Most of our customers want digital uploads they can use on screens and cell phones. Absolutely, right. Yeah. And that's a whole other podcast.

Gary Pageau 37:29

It is, yeah. A lot of people are doing that for sure. In fact, a lot of the people don't even, it's really weird, they don't even want their negatives back. It's just once they're scanning uploaded, it's like, what do I do with this negative thing?

Dale Farkas 37:40

Which is I'll tell you the honest truth. I will not do that. I I guess I'm just an old-fashioned guy. Yeah. I can't throw away anything. Exactly. I know that. Awesome, Dale. Listen. Thank you so much for your invitation.

Erin Manning 38:01

Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixel Society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at www.the deadpixelssociety.com.