Image Maker celebrates 30 years downtown

Van Dellens hand reins over to Hammersbergs

SANDPOINT - Few industries have changed as quickly, or completely, as the photo business during the past 30 years.

Over that entire period, one local business rode wave after wave of new technology and always managed to stay afloat despite fierce competition for the photo shopper's dollar.

On Thursday, Image Maker Photo & Video celebrates three decades of doing business in downtown Sandpoint. At the same time, the ownership of the business will officially change hands, as Clarence and Linda Van Dellen turn the shop over to new owners Mike and Randi Hammersberg.

In the early days, photo processing was handled out-of-house, although the store did process customer negatives on-site. What the Image Maker became known for was a full line of cameras from major names like Nikon, Canon and Pentax, along with film and accessories.

“We carried manual exposure, manual focus cameras and we also had movie cameras and movie projectors - things that are all dead technology now,” Clarence Van Dellen said. “Canon came out with the first automatic SLR (single-lens reflex) camera - the AE-1 - the year after we opened and that model stayed current in the line for 10 years.

“These days, if you can get 10 months out of a model you're doing good,” he added.

The most sweeping change came in the wake of the digital revolution, which rewrote the book on camera operations and rendered film nearly obsolete. For a short period, the high price of digital equipment, coupled with the fact that film still delivered better images, held off what would eventually become a knockout punch for traditional camera gear.

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“They were predicting a much longer transition from film to digital,” Van Dellen said. “But the quality went up and the prices came down so fast that it happened in about a quarter of the time everyone thought it would take.”

The Image Maker was ready when that seismic shift hit the photo trade, making shelf space available for this new breed of camera. One of the reasons the store fared better than many small-town peers during the period was that Mike Hammersberg embraced new technology in general.

Hammersberg joined the staff in 1991 after working as merchandising manager for J.C. Penney, where he helped moved the former downtown store to its current Bonner Mall location. His background in marketing and advertising melded well with the Van Dellens' emphasis on product knowledge and customer service.

Hammersberg was given 3 percent of gross sales as an advertising budget and with those ads in place, revenues popped immediately.

“Sales grew from 10 to 15 and then to 20 percent over those first few years,” Hammersberg said.

Another advantage and key to the store's longevity has been the store's well-stocked matting and frame department, which Linda Van Dellen expanded over time to drive additional sales.

Since the Image Maker opened on March 20, 1978, approximately six other photo stores or 1-hour photo shops have come and gone. The biggest competition arrived when big-box discounters entered the picture and opened photo-processing departments. In response, the store simply held its quality up for comparison and, in turn, ended up converting more customers than they ever risked losing.

“When it comes to photo processing, the old saying is: quality, speed, price - pick any two,” Clarence Van Dellen said.

The store added a digital processor about two years ago, equipment that the Hammersbergs are now leveraging to the fullest.

“Customers can now go online anytime and send images to the Image Maker over the Internet,” Mike Hammersberg said. “We can print anything from a 4-by-6 to an 8-by-12 that can be picked up in the store, or we can mail or UPS it back to the customer.”

The new owners' daughter, Michaella, a senior at Sandpoint High School, maintains the store's Web site, which features complete information about products, accessories and services, covering everything from camera prices and specifications to passport photo information.

The former owners came out of retirement to run the shop for a week this winter when the entire staff traveled to the annual photo trade show in Las Vegas. While there, the crew took classes, received training in the latest photo technologies and sat in on workshops and seminars related to new product categories.

Armed with that knowledge, the store now offers in-house services such as photo restoration, publishing and binding of coffee table-quality photo books using customer images, and transferring images to CD or DVD format.

“We can do the transferring with almost any input - slides, photographs, video cassettes - and then do things like add titles or put music beds behind it,” Hammersberg said. “We want to get out to the world that we're doing a lot of exciting things these days; a lot more than just 4-by-6 prints.”

The industry continues to evolve - video cameras have grown even smaller with higher quality and memory card storage, while previous point-and-shoot photographers are stepping up to the most recent versions of digital SLR cameras and the broader range of shooting options they provide - but the Sandpoint shop has held on to its old ways of taking care of the customer.

“We've made some changes, but the heart of the operation is still what was established 30 years ago,” Hammersberg said. “We're still in the business of preserving people's memories and people's lives. And that's an honorable profession to be in.”

Information: www.imagemakerphotoandvideo.com