In Store

A Light in the Digital Dark Age

Bellevue’s busiest mom-and-pop camera store is resolved to offer a helpful hand in an increasingly figure-it-out-yourself industry.

Photo by Kyle Johnson

Husband-and-wife team Larry Meese (above) and Barbara Klempnow have seen ups and downs before. The couple used to steer a chain of camera stores around Seattle, in addition to stereo stores, which they turned into computer stores in the late ’70s. Progressive enough to establish a pioneering computer distribution company, they were the Apple distributor for the Pacific Northwest and Alaska – back when Apple had seventeen employees.

Now their empire has been whittled down to just the one store in Bellevue, Omega Photo, but Meese and Klempnow hardly seem stressed; they’re just busily focused on their day-to-day work. Klempnow, originally from Germany, barely gets off the phone during our interview, but she still pokes her head in briefly. Meese, who studied vocal music at the University of Washington, hums as he reviews paperwork. Around them, desks and filing cabinets fill every inch of free space. The phone rings like mad and employees buzz about their work everywhere.

No one seems to have told Meese or Klempnow that photography isn’t the stuff of viable storefronts anymore. Nobody prints pictures – or if they do, it’s at Costco. Right?

Somehow, the couple soldiers on despite the traumatic changes the industry has faced. As photography manufacturers, labs and stores die out – or get bought out in an oversaturated culture of homogenized conglomerates – Omega perseveres as one of a handful of locally owned camera shops around Puget Sound. The difference the personal touch makes is evident as soon as you walk in the door.

A series of artisan wooden bowls and Chukar cherries are available for sale. Local photographers’ work hangs poster-sized on the walls. And customers’ personalized photo holiday cards fill the foyer as part of a holiday contest. My favorite: a card captioned “Crossing the Badain Jaran Desert, Ningxia Province, inner Mongolia.” In the photo, a man smiles from under a turban and designer sunglasses; inside the card are beautiful panoramas of camels marching single file over golden dunes.

The atmosphere of the store is recognizably different, too. First of all, there are customers here. And none of them wait idly, because there are upwards of seven employees working the small sales floor – on a Tuesday afternoon.

This, Meese explains, is one of Omega’s deadliest tools in the war against the “digital dark age,” in which people are taking more pictures than ever before but, for a number of reasons, printing fewer. Meese wonders, can an image really be preserved on a memory card or the internet? “These things can be lost,” he argues. “It makes me sad to think that an entire generation, who has taken more pictures than ever before, may end up having less to show for it.”

But Meese recognizes that you can’t un-convince people of the pleasures of instant gratification. So he makes it Omega’s business to get people to wherever they want to go: if you’re a professional photographer in need of the latest telephoto lens, if you’re a grandparent wanting to personalize wrapping paper with digital photos, or if you just want a friendly place you trust to reprint your wedding album, Omega wants to be your partner. “Things change so fast [in the camera industry], it’s difficult for the consumer,” Meese says. “The camera’s life cycle in the marketplace is getting ridiculously short; education and guidance are needed. That’s why we are here.”

I’m struck by how practical and levelheaded Meese is, even as he tells me how horrible 2008 was for business. “It was terrible. It was for everybody.” But his dry humor (Meese loves to pun) and straight-arrow business acumen reveal themselves quickly.

In addition to witnessing the remarkable evolution of photography in the last fifty years, Meese and Klempnow have also survived a transformation of Bellevue’s landscape. Meese once counted fourteen high-rise cranes from where he sat at a traffic stoplight. But, just as the demise of Kodachrome and Afga haven’t stopped him, he carries on in the new Bellevue without fuss.

“Things splurge forward,” he reckons. “It’s not a good/bad question. It’s an ‘is.’ If all you say to yourself is, ‘business as usual,’ you are doomed.”

Omega Photo
1100 Bellevue Way NE, Bellevue
425.455.2126
omegaphoto.biz