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Closing the studio

Professional photographer Maureen Powers is packing up, not giving up

-Messenger photo by Hans Madsen Maureen Powers, owner of Buckroyd Studio in Fort Dodge, looks over an old 5-by-7 view camera in the back work rooms of the studio at 1222 Central Ave. Over the past 70 years, a large collection of props, cameras and other artifacts has steadily accumulated.

Once upon a time, the small open space just behind the front showroom at Buckroyd Studio would have been used by owner Maureen Powers to sit down with clients and help them select their senior pictures or family portraits.

Today, with the walls still decorated with hundreds of sample picture frames, the table once used for that is piled with prints, odds and ends that includes a miniature Shrek slide viewer toy, and several boxes of cassette tapes she’s sorting through.

She sighs.

“If I don’t ever look at what they are and just toss them I’ll never know the difference.” she said.

A few minutes later, the phone rings. It’s a robocall.

-Messenger photo by Hans Madsen Maureen Powers, owner of Buckroyd Studio in Fort Dodge, looks over a few packages of old black and white developing chemicals in the studio's darkroom. Powers last used it about 8 years ago.

“Good morning,” the mechanical voice asks. “Have you considered selling your business?”

While she isn’t selling, she is closing the studio. She hopes to have it vacated by May 1.

She’s not hanging up her camera, though.

“I’m not retiring from the industry,” she said. “I’m trying a different way of doing it. I’m going to be concentrating on my art prints. I don’t need all this overhead to do that.”

Powers purchased the studio in 1983 from Jim and Leota Buckroyd. They opened it in 1947 and moved into the current location at 1222 Central Ave. right after the building was put up in 1967.

-Messenger photo by Hans Madsen Maureen Powers, owner of Buckroyd Studio in Fort Dodge, looks over a set of incadescent studio lights that were made sometime in the 40s or 50s. She's used the lights on occasion to recreate the lighting styles in use then.

“Jim called me up and asked if I was interested in buying it,” she said. “He wanted to retire.”

In the past, the work life at a studio tended to follow a yearly pattern.

“In the fall it was family groups; in the summer, seniors,” she said. “We always did a lot of commercial work and a lot of copy and restoration.”

The commercial work and the restoration helped pay the bills.

“You did commercial work and restoration during the slow season,” she said. “People don’t do that anymore.”

In the film days, restoring a photograph was a long, involved process. After photographing the damaged original, she would make a print and do the actual work on it.

“The work print is what you did all the work on by hand,” she said. “When it was done, you would rephotograph it and make prints from that negative.”

Photo restoration is almost a lost art.

“Stuff you can do on the computer in two seconds now,” she said. “I did it with oil paint.”

That’s not all bad though.

“Now you can take a week’s worth of work and it can be done in half a day,” she said. “That’s a good thing about digital.”

After nearly 70 years as a business and almost 50 years in the same location, a lot of, well, stuff, remains. It’s much like an archeological dig — the deepest layers towards the back of the studio contain the oldest artifacts.

“The minute you step through that door you’re going back to the ’50s and ’60s,” she said.

Behind that door, a visitor will find a darkroom that still smells faintly of the chemical used to process black and white film. And there’s a set of studio lights that use bulbs the size of a grapefruit.

“I stopped using the darkroom eight years ago or so,” Powers said. “Mostly because the darkroom needed a bunch of plumbing work and I decided not to spend money on it.”

While the plumbing may have been the final nail in the film coffin, other factors were making it more and more difficult. Many of Power’s favorite photo papers had been discontinued, as were some black and white film types.

There’s still a collection of yellow Kodak boxes holding long-outdated photo paper stocks and brown glass jars with similar yellow labels that hold raw chemicals.

“I know I had one kind, Kodak Opel,” she said. “That had to be from the ’50s. These have metal lids, these have to be from the ’50s too.”

She’s slowly going through the collection, working her way back in time.

“It’s not depressing,” she said. “It’s bittersweet. It’s fun to look at the old stuff. You need to follow the two-second rule, though, and not fall down the rabbit hole.”

She’s planning on having a garage sale to try to find new homes for much of the old gear, props, backgrounds and assorted odds and ends. She’s also working to tie up the last loose ends.

“I have orders here that need to be picked up,” she said.

Powers has seen the photography business change a lot.

“I see a huge turnaround,” she said. “A studio used to be in town forever. Now a new one pops up and they’re gone in a few years. Now there’s a revolving door.”

She doesn’t think that a lot of those hanging up their shingles are really aware of what they’re getting into.

“It’s become ‘not a business,'” she said. “The full-time mom and pop studio is all but gone. I know people go into it thinking it’s going to be a fun job. It is, but it’s also a lot of work.”

Digital photography has also increased the number of people trying their hand at the business who perhaps should not.

“People think that if you open a Facebook page, ‘now I’m a photographer,'” she said. “There’s more to photography than putting your camera on auto and creating a Facebook page.”

The net result, Powers believes, is an overall lowering of quality.

“It bothers me what people accept,” she said. “Being a professional, it’s one-fourth equipment and three-fourths working with people, knowing what to do to make them look good in the picture without fixing it in Photoshop.”

When she works in the studio, the one place you won’t actually see her is behind the camera peering into the viewfinder.

“In order to get expressions, you need to have your camera on a tripod,” she said. “If you’re hiding behind a camera, you can’t work with a child, for example. I see a lot of portraits where there’s no expression in the eyes. The craft and art has gone out of it.”

Powers will be continuing to make photographs and produce her art prints. She’ll just be working out of her home.

“It’s been a fun ride but I’m not getting off the bus yet,” she said.

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