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Driggers Photography, 6291 Saint Andrews Road: 2020s (Moved)   5 comments

Posted at 11:24 pm in closing

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I've noticed this mid-century ranch house in Seven Oaks a number of times over the last year or so, but saw lately that there was a for-sale sign on the property. From what I can tell, Drigger's Photography has moved, or perhaps gone to a primarily online presence.

Given the location I would not be at all surprised to see this place razed after it sells with some sort of professional building going in, but time will tell.

UPDATE 20 October 2022 -- As mentioned in the comments, this is now Modern Roofing:

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Written by ted on June 27th, 2022

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Forest & Grant Photo Imaging, 3310 Forest Drive: August 2019   1 comment

Posted at 11:25 pm in closing

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I was not familiar with this photo services business in the little strip beside Richland Mall, but apparently it closed sometime in August. There is already a new operation setting up: Bad Daddy's Burger Bar which appears to be an up-and-coming chain of, well, burger bars. They apparently have locations in Greenville and the Low Country, but this will be the first location in the Midlands. I have to say the space seems rather small for a restaurant, and there's not a lot of parking either.

(Hat tip to commenter Mr. BO)

Written by ted on October 22nd, 2019

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Portrait Innovations, 201 Harbision Boulevard Suite 130: 2018   no comments

Posted at 12:18 am in closing

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This storefront is in that faux Tudor little strip of Harbision around the Bower Parkway intersection. Portrait Innovations listed in the 2018 phonebook, so I'm pegging the closing as this year. From what I can see Portrait Innovations is a national photography chain, and there is still apparently a store at Sandhill.

Written by ted on October 18th, 2018

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Jackson Camera / Church, 405 Greenlawn Drive:   3 comments

Posted at 12:28 am in closing

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I noticed this former church driving down Greenlawn Drive the other day (and you don't see that very often!). Unfortunately, it was basically at or just after sunset, so the pictures did not come out very well.

I'm not quite sure who the tenant was. Google suggests, Good Shepherd's Faith Assembly which is currently on Garner Lane, but their web site doesn't mention any move. The sign out front points to Word Of Truth, but the website on the sign does not mention this location. Perhaps they are about to move there as the place has been sold.

At any rate LoopNet has a much better picture.

UPDATE 20 May 2018 -- Adding Jackson Camera to the post title based on the comments.

Written by ted on May 19th, 2018

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The F-Stop Camera Shop, 1224-B Huger Street: 16 July 2011   10 comments

Posted at 12:35 am in Uncategorized

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When I was around 10, I semi-inherited a bunch of darkroom equipment, and drove the guys at Jackson Cameras to distraction with all my questions, and my mother to distraction with all the chemical stains (still there today) on her kitchen countertops. Given that, and the number of film cameras I have salted away in storage somewhere (including a Kodak 616 format box camera that worked the last time I tried it..), I always figured I would drop by film haven The F-Stop Camera Shop someday. I noted when it moved here from Five Points, and somehow still didn't get around to it.

Hard to believe I haven't been in a darkroom since 1976..

UPDATE 12 September 2012: Added two pictures of the place in operation that I forgot to copy over.

Written by ted on September 12th, 2012

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South Carolina State Fair 2010 Fine Art Exhibition Premiere & Awards Reception, Fairgrounds: 10 October 2010   2 comments

Posted at 12:15 am in Uncategorized

Ritz Camera, 100 Columbiana Circle Suite 102: July 2009   2 comments

Posted at 5:32 pm in closing

This is another casualty of the Ritz Camera chain's downsizing. Previously I wrote about the store on Two Notch Road which closed earlier this summer, and was hoping the other stores were safe. Unfortunately the trend seems to be continuing with this, the Harbison area store, closing while I was on vacation in July.

My observations of the Beltline store makes it seem to me that Ritz has almost totally ditched film photography for digital. I found that the last time I was in there and needed a roll of 35mm, they had a smaller selection than either Wal-Mart or Walgreen's. I'm sure this is a deliberate stragegy, and obviously digital is where the market is and where it will be. On the other hand, when you go to an actual "camera" store, you expect some more obscure items than you can find at the corner drugstore, so I'm not sure the strategy isn't a mixed blessing during this final film/digital period of transition.

UPDATE 30 August 2017 -- Still vacant 8 years later:

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Written by ted on August 24th, 2009

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Columbia Photo Supply, 2912 Devine Street: 2007   13 comments

Posted at 2:30 am in Uncategorized

I only went in to Columbia Photo Supply once. I have an old Fujica ST-605 35mm camera that my mother bought me in tenth grade (75 or 76 I think) for photography class. Aside from a built in exposure meter, this is a completely manual SLR and had given me years of good service, and in fact I took a number of the older pictures on this site with it (for instance The Towers).

Unfortunately, the film advance started giving me trouble resulting in double exposures in some cases and missed shots in others when I could not advance and cock the shutter at all. With the closure of Jackson Cameras, I didn't really know of a full service camera store in the old sense (a store that might actually have local people that knew something about fixing cameras), but I decided to try Columbia Photo. I thought it did have a bit of that old Jackson atmosphere, and I enjoyed looking at all the paraphernalia like developer and stop baths that I hadn't come into contact with in years, but in the event it turned out that the camera was too old to get parts for, so I wasn't able to get it fixed.

Not too long after that, the store went out of business, and now Rogers Brothers Fabrics has moved from Trenholm Plaza into the old Columbia Photo building.

And the camera saga had a fairly happy ending. I went on ebay and got an identical ST-605 (which came from Australia with a roll of film showing some kid posing in his karate uniform with his pet rabbit..) which works fine and which I still use when I want to shoot something high-res (though that may change now that I have a new digital "closing cam 2").

UPDATE 27 July 2010: Rogers Brothers at this location has now closed

Written by ted on January 12th, 2009

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Jackson Camera, all over Columbia (1326 Main Street, 405 Greenlawn Drive, 625 Harden Street, 3407 Forest Drive, Richland Mall, Dutch Square, Columbia Mall): 1990s   21 comments

Posted at 6:24 pm in closing

Jackson Camera. At their height, they had stores all over Columbia. I can recall locations at Richland Mall (on the backside of the open-air corridor), Main Street, Five Points and Dutch Square.

The location I always visited was at Richland Mall. As a kid, I had gotten into developing and printing pictures. I can't remember exactly how, but I had already started fooling around with it when I "inherited" a bunch of (mostly hand-made) equipment from someone moving out of town to a smaller place. Originally I had no enlarger so I favored bigger-frame negatives like (the even-then archaic) 616 and slightly smaller 620 and 127 film sizes which made accptable contact prints. I'm afraid I pretty much ruined the finish on the kitchen counters with sloshing developer, stop-bath and "hypo" all over them -- the stains are there to this day. And really, there was no way to make the kitchen dark enough to be a "real" darkroom during the day (not surprisingly, my mother needed it to cook at night..), so my prints and negatives were always fuzzy, but I never hesitated to try again, and to ask for more advice down at Jackson Camera.

I'm sure the guy who was usually there, would look up, see me coming across the corridor and think Oh Lord, here we go again, but he and all the staff were always very patient and informative despite the fact that I took up way more of their time than my meager purchases of contact paper and chemicals would warrant. By middle school, I had more or less fallen out of the habit (and in high school, the darkroom had its own stock of chemicals and paper), so my visits to Jackson almost ceased.

Even as I moved out of town in 1985 though, the photo market was changing drastically. While the picture drop-off business had always (in my memory) been a chain dominated affair, in the 80s, national chains moved into the camera shop and specialty photo-finishing market. Wolf and Ritz were the big players, and when Ritz bought Wolf, they were the 500 pound gorilla that sleeps where it wants. Jackson kept on for years, but gradually closed more of their stores. The one pictured here is at the corner of Beltline Boulevard and Forest Drive, and is where, I believe, their Richland Mall shop moved when Richland Mall went to Richland "Fashion" Mall, driving out a number of stalwarts like Jackson Camera and The Happy Bookseller. Jackson finally sold out to Ritz a few years ago, and this location operated as a Ritz for a while, but with another Ritz just a few blocks away down Beltline, it didn't really make any sense to keep this one open.

Interestingly, as I went to take this shot, I saw that the follow-on business, some sort of beauty store is also closing up shop.

UPDATE 21 May 2010 -- Here's an ad from The State for 19 Feb 1979:

Also, I've added all the addresses from the ad to the post title.

UPDATE 3 December 2010 -- Here are two great shots of the Harden Street Store by Hunter Desportes on Flickr:

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UPDATE 24 February 2013: I have added two pictures to the top of this post, above the one (of the beauty store) that the text of the post talks about. They come from commenter Thomas and were taken of the Main Street location in 1997. I love that huge marquee.. Thanks!

UPDATE 23 February 2014 -- The Forest Drive store is now Troy's Cutting Edge barber shop:

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UPDATE 20 May 2018 -- Here is a picture of the Greenlawn location, which ended up getting its own post because I totally forgot Jackson had a Greenlawn location:

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