By Andrew Jenner   andrew@rocktownmail.com

“The microscope is my friend,” says Frank Marshman, owner of Camera Wiz Camera Repair. The vast majority of his repairs are mechanical problems, even though nearly every camera that comes through his door is now digital. Photo by Michael Reilly

It was about five years ago when things changed, seemingly overnight, says Frank Marshman, sitting in front of the soldering iron and microscope in his shop.

“[Digital] went gangbusters,” he says. “The floodgates opened.”

Marshman, the owner of Camera Wiz Camera Repair, thinks it happened about the time the basic digital point-and-shoots got down to about $300, and a digital SLR could be had for around $1,000. Whatever the reason, this is the result: Marshman now repairs about three film cameras, and dozens of digitals, a month. The world is digital, he says, matter-of-factly, and film is basically dead.

Marshman has worked in camera repair since beginning a two-year apprenticeship in Chicago in 1972, and first encountered a primitive digital camera about a decade later at a trade show. He and some buddies passed it around, impressed mainly by how horrible and useless it was at taking pictures, and they generally failed to anticipate exactly what sort of impact its technological progeny would have on photography two decades thence.

When the digital camera wave did hit the photograph-taking public in the early 2000s — by which time Marshman had returned to this, his home area, opened a camera repair shop downtown, moved it a couple times, sold it, went to work for a Charlottesville repair shop and then, went back into business for himself with Camera Wiz in ’94 — he was stuck with $25,000 worth of film camera parts for which he suddenly had no use.

That sort of bump aside, the masses’ conversion to digital photography hasn’t really affected Marshman all that much. Business is consistent, as it’s been ever since he started (the fact that repair shops like his are few and far between helps), and the day-to-day nature of the job hasn’t changed much either.

About 80 percent of his repairs, then and now, are for mechanical issues, mostly symptoms of camera dropping, bashing, smashing, etc. He figures that less than 10 percent of his fixes are for simple electronics failures, and somewhat counter-intuitively, digital cameras suffer these far less than film cameras, because they have fewer moving parts to mess things up, Marshman says. And he’s glad for this, because electronics stuff can get tricky and tedious, especially now that, per some bureaucrat’s dictum, things are made with lead-free solder, which, he says, is “the bane of the world” because it just doesn’t work as well, and, he guesses, is behind about 50 percent of electronics failures in the first place.

Marshman also does some restoration work (in his shop now is an 1850s cube-shaped camera — “sliding box” body style used for wet plate images, for those who get jazzed about that kind of stuff — that he’s fixing up for a customer in California), and other general wear and tear repairs, like sand or water damage, pretty much round out his business.

The wear and tear issue does hit on an emergent issue in digital-era camera repair: people take so many more photographs, now that film’s per-exposure cost is history, that they wear out the shutters in their SLRs.

Another semi-related perspective on the digital conversion, since that’s turned out to be the theme here: Allen Showalter, president of Showalter Imaging Group, which owns King Photo, says he saw steady, 20 percent stair-step increases in film-to-digital conversion from ’02 to ’07. The jumps usually happened right after Christmas, and now, Showalter says, except for the single-use camera folks, the only people getting 35mm film developed anymore are the hardcore holdouts who, for whatever reason, ain’t never gonna change. One hypothetical explanation for Marshman’s sudden observed change during Showalter’s gradual one, Showalter says, is that during this c.2002-2007 tidal shift in consumer camera preference, people with functioning film cameras continued to develop film. When they dropped their camera on the sidewalk, though, they didn’t take it to Camera Wiz anymore; they took the opportunity to convert to digital.

“He’s very knowledgeable about any kind of camera,” said Allen Litten, a retired, longtime Daily News-Record photographer and friend of Marshman’s. “It’s just a big advantage to have somebody in the area like that.”

For a year soon after college and before the Chicago apprenticeship, Marshman was himself a DN-R photographer who worked under Litten.

“I’ve just always liked working with mechanical things,” says Marshman, now fiddling with a piece of a Canon SLR into which someone jammed a backwards memory card.

He peers into his desktop microscope (“The microscope is my friend,” he says, before wistfully remarking on the acuity of his vision when he was a young man in the 35mm Age), touches the soldering iron to the shoddy lead-free soldered guts of the camera, sending a plume of thin smoke ceilingward in the shop, crowded with tools and papers and a thousand cameras in a thousand states of disassembly, where life, believe it or not, goes on as it always has.