It all began in 1966, back when Bairnsdale had just rid itself of the last of the Kelly gang and the bush rangers no longer troubled the honest citizens of the town.
Of course it wasn't quite that bad.
Back to the story, Elsie Anderson, a photographer in Bairnsdale, opened her shop next to Dominic's Milk Bar in Service Street and after a great deal of thought and market research she named it….. Bairnsdale Camera Shop. She offered for sale, to the shoppers of East Gippsland, the wonders of modern technology…… 126 Instamatics, Polaroid Swingers, super fast colour film rated at 80 ISO [called ASA then], movie making with Super 8 and the first of the Pentax Spotmatic SLR's , the SLR that would revolutionise the single lens reflex camera. At that time though most 35mm users were content with their Kodak Retinette 1b's and Voigtlander Bessamatic's, and of course colour slides were THE name of the game, perfect for the slide nights.
In 1971, Elsie sold her business to Matt Broeren, a film processor based in Newborough, on the outskirts of Moe. He had been designing and building a new range of processing equipment called Focus Prosomat, to replace the old machinery he'd used in his shed in the family garden. Within the space of a few years he dominated photo processing in Gippsland and beyond.
Back to Bairnsdale, Matt needed a person to run this shop, so he took on a partner, a young photographer from Geelong, who had been employed by a well established photographer Arthur Reed. This young man's name was Peter Cosham. Peter set about bringing to Bairnsdale the "big smoke" way of retailing . Having succeeded in Bairnsdale, Peter began to look beyond this town, into Sale. The empire grew over subsequent years to seven stores. In the meantime the Bairnsdale store had moved across the road and changed its trading name to Peter Cosham's Camera Shop and then to Peter Cosham's Camera House.
In 1977, a recent arrival to this town, in fact to these shores, was employed as manager and so began a era that continues to today. That was...Geoff Frith. In 1980 the store was moved again to its present position in Nicholson Street.
In 1982, a first for Bairnsdale, we installed a mini lab, a Yokayama King, which provided the town with one hour photo processing and the name changed [again] to Peter Cosham's Photo Express. This was such a huge success that we were to double our staff. Geoff remained as manager until 1983 when he and another employee Marion Melotte purchased the business. Shortly after, the name [you've guessed it] changed again this time to Photo Express Bairnsdale.
Business continued growing relatively smoothly, the name, amazingly, remained unchanged for 6 years until 1988 when Geoff and Marion decided to leave Photo Express and join the Camera House Group. Accordingly we repainted the front to read Bairnsdale Camera House [as you can tell a lot of research time was spent on that naming].
In 1993, Marion had decided it was time to move on and sold her part of the business to Geoff. Shortly thereafter, can you guess ? Yes the name changed one final time to Geoff's Camera House and indeed much market research was used to determine that name.
Geoff's Camera House under the management of Geoff and Judy, had continued to grow, which includeded occupying the adjacent premises for the space needed to introduce many new initiatives for Bairnsdale:-
First Digital Printing
First Film to CD
First Digital Photo Restoration
First Digital Camera Centre,
First Film to Internet
First Studio Quality Wide Format Printing.
First Digital Photo Kiosks
First Online Printing Service
First Digital Lounge, not just for Bairnsdale but in the State, perhaps Australia.
First Digital School
First Canvas Printing
We have not, in the last 14 years,
moved
nor changed the name.
Although watch this space...........
As of the 1st July 2007 we changed our name to Creative Pictures to more reflect the nature of our business
