August 12, 2004 Issue                                       

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©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

New Photo Workshop on the Hill is eye-OK
by PAT STOKES

Come fall, not far off, the tempo of life on the Hill will pick up. Folks returning from shore, mountain and resort will note changes on the Avenue, some obvious, some subtle. In the latter category, a kind of business equivalent of upstairs/downstairs can now be found at 8011 Germantown Ave.

For some time past, the first floor space at this location housed Penguin Photo, a photo developing shop that has since moved to another Hill location. Now, behind the bright yellow door, film processing still goes on, but with a difference. Its new name is The Photo Workshop.

For now, let’s trot upstairs to the top half of this enterprise, a complete all-inclusive studio for high-end art reproduction. Here I find the techy dynamos behind this notable operation, Mike and Janine Zaikowski, and David Neff. To label them “dedicated” wouldn’t begin to describe the passion for their work. They LOVE it; they truly CARE. For this crew, getting things absolutely, positively right is what makes their day.

As a couple of movie fugitives once famously said, “Who are these guys?” Well, Mike is a native New Yorker, who won his degree in photo science from the State University of New York. He always loved photography, but more than just taking pictures, he preferred to focus on the mechanics of making the prints. Janine, his wife, with a charming British lilt to her words, is from England. With a major in German, she did administration work for a U.K. center that exported photographic equipment. Traveling around, pursuing his interest in photography, Mike found himself there, too.

In 1991, Kodak unveiled the “Create-a-Print” machine, an ingeniously designed gizmo that allowed aspiring photographers to make their own prints, copies, etc. The possibilities for its use strongly appealed to Mike, and he envisioned it as a kind of centerpiece for a shop of his own. Indeed, he opened said shop that very year at 8 W. Willow Grove Ave., did well, and five years later was ready to expand and get onto the Avenue. In 1996 realtor Ted Helmetag sold him the building at 8011, and now, just a few months ago, as the first floor space became available, the “upstairs, downstairs” plan was set in place.

Here, on the second floor, in the space called Profiles, Mike revels in his super-accurate high-resolution art reproduction work. As referred to in a previous article about Sara Steele, who entrusts her brilliant flower paintings exclusively to Mike for printing, the machine he uses to turn them out is appropriately named Iris, referring perhaps not to the flower, but to the iris of the eye, which can adjust so sensitively to color and light.

This is the epitome of color-managed software. Profiling is the term used for the adjustment of the settings for depth and intensity of color. The software that sets it up is a million-dollar word, spectrophotometer, which measures the color accurately, then allows the computer to carry out its commands.

The accuracy standard provided by this kind of technology is at the crux of great photo reproduction. All of this know-how is indelibly burned into Mike’s brain, but as if that were not enough, he has the assistance of another “technogeek,” Dave Neff. Dave’s wealth of experience was originally earned at Dan’s Camera City in Allentown, “one of the best run camera stores in the country” says Mike.

Dave came to Mike’s place one day to repair a machine, the Noritsu, a contrivance so delicately designed it must be in perfect balance to achieve its ultimate potential. Dave is the genius who can pull of this balancing act, having installed and worked on 50 or so Noritsu machines. (Need I mention, Dave stayed.)

This question of balance, care and attention to details is what fuses the upstairs artwork with the downstairs everyday “birthday party” print work, since both operations benefit form the same technology. Needless to say, every customer who comes in with his/her precious stash of family or other films has the advantage of all the know-how that goes into the printing of an equally precious piece of fine art.

Expectations are changing for those who just “take pictures.” It’s more than that now: people want collages, posters, invitations and many other sophisticated products, and they want them to be a certain way, just as they visualize them. I was able to observe a conversation with just such a customer, to whom Mike and Dave carefully listened and made note of her ideas, assuring her they’d be carried out just the way she wished. I got the feeling she was very pleased.

Also making serious contributions to this effort are Nicki Toizer, production and printing, and Frank Cutrone, the friendly face at the front desk.

For more information, call 215-247-0740. See you on the Avenue.