My name is Ron, I own and run a photo lab in San Diego called ProLabPrints.com (aka Fromex Photo) - we also have a sister photo lab that specializes in low cost 8x10 and 11x14 prints. I have worked in the photo industry since the dawn of time 1987 or so when I was shooting too much film in high school and needed a way to cut costs - what better than to work in a lab? Along the way the industry has changed and become very technical which seems to suit me.
While I am currently fully employed, I am always looking for new ventures, and am very open in sharing my experience and helping others.
You can find me on talk.jekyllrb.com, GitHub, and occasionally Stack Overflow.
Some of my experiences:
- BS in Accounting from SDSU
- Owner/President/Janitor/Web Designer at Fromex Photo Lab, Inc (aka ProLabPrints.com) since 1998.
- LOTS of onsite shooting experience at amateur mx and mountain biking events. Before digital cameras came around I had a trailer with a full photo lab setup and would shoot and sell 8x10 photos during events.
- Co-founder of Pictology.com (~2001), an online proofing service for photographers. Eventually this was sold to a competitor, but not for very much money. This was not very successful but was a huge learning experience - setting up a corporation, adding investors, running servers out of a colo etc. and was the starting point of me learning programming (mostly html and css, but a little C#).
- Creator of FTP2Lab.com (~2006) a simple service for labs like mine to allow their customers to send files to them via a custom FTP client. This was super cool at the time and was used by a few dozen labs other than my own. I out-sourced the code to someone and acted as project manager. This is no longer active.
- I used DNN (DotNetNuke - similar to wordpress) extensively from about 2003 up until I discovered Jekyll around 2013, I used that for almost all my web projects until about 2023. I now mostly use React / Next JS for web projects.
- I have created several windows desktop programs that solve small specific problems in my industry. Usually these are things that I outsource to Elance (or whatever it is called now).
- Founder of ePhotoPros.com (~2007). This was supposed to be a subscription based online community for photographers. It never quite took off, but our videos have had well over 1 million views in total (youtube plus website hosted). Most of the videos were made by an employee (Jeff St John) who did an awesome job. I still occasionally make videos for it, and use the ePhotoPros youtube channel for a variety of stuff.
- Somewhere along the line I found Daniel Shifman’s youtube channel and started playing with p5.js and generative art. Every once in a while I make something cool and post it to texturesandcolors.com.
- Around 2022 I made a new website just for people to print photos to fit a locket. This way the website can be 100% about printing pictures to fit a locket and not have to worry about other products or services.
- A lot of what our lab does is fulfill Amazon and Etsy orders for prints. We have a separate Print on Demand website for this, one of the coolest things there is a free mockup generator for people selling prints - it outputs 2000x2000px images in a few mock ups to use as a listing images.
- My latest project: https://simpleordersystem.com a web based ordering system for labs and printers using node and react js.
I have some decent skills in the following: Noritsu/Fuji photo lab equipment, large format inkjet printers, color management, ROES, LabWorks POS, Fiery CWS, Adobe Photoshop, Sublime Text, HTML, CSS, Markdown, AWS (S3, EC2, Route 53, Dynamo, API Gateway, SES) and pick up new skills fairly well.