Welcome, and thank you for joining me in the telling of my story of how Marc Carver Photography began.
Ever since I can remember I have enjoyed looking at and taking pictures. As a young lad, I would use my parent's Brownie box camera to take fun pictures of our pets. I remember once trying to convince the man behind the photo counter at Gibson's in Lawrence, Kansas that the image he refused to print was not a mistake, but a double exposure of my dog photographed from far away being attacked by one of our chickens.
On another occasion Gibson’s refused to print the pictures that I took of the stars. The photo department manager once again reminded me of the stores policy which states that double-exposures and blank images will not be printed. You can imagine as a 10 year old boy just how frustrated I became in the area of photography. I could take the photo but could never see the picture? On the negatives I could see the chicken and the dog, and the stars just fine. Why wouldn't they print them? I sometimes wonder if this disappointment in my life became the driving force to figure out a way to print them myself. Whenever we visited the public library, I would check out books on photography and specifically how to process film and make prints. When I was 12 years old I decided photography was going to become my lifelong goal.
My brother Nile and I, (I am on the left) shared this same passion for photography which lead us to ask for very unusual Christmas gifts. I don't know where we found this mail order catalog "Edmund's Scientific", but inside we found the perfect Christmas gifts for each other. I picked out a plastic 35mm camera kit and Nile chose the plastic enlarger kit.
Would you believe that we got what we asked for that year! My father let us order the two items and they arrived just in time for Christmas! These gifts launched our desire to learn all about photography.
The kits not only taught us how to assemble the camera and the enlarger, but they also went into great detail as to how light and optic lenses worked. The enlarger kit explained how silver halide crystals could be controlled by light and stabilized by a chemical process.
Together we spent hours learning and experimenting with all kinds of photographic processes. Who would guess that from these humble beginnings I found my desire to make it my lifelong work?
It didn’t take long, before my brother and I learned a tremendous amount about photographic processes and how cameras worked.
We soon realized our plastic camera and enlarger kits were no longer able to keep up with our desire to learn more. I knew I had to get a job to pay for our hobby. So, in the late summer of my 6th grade year I decided to pick up hay for the farmers in my area just outside of Lawrence. The work was hard and hot, but the reward was sweet. I got money.
Nile, felt like he wanted to contribute to our to our hobby as well, but at that time he was only 10 years old and not strong enough to buck bales of hay, so he decided to sell seed packets to our rural neighbors. That was a real thing in our time. You could buy flower and vegetable seeds in packets ready to plant.
Together, we saved for three summers to get enough money to buy our first real 35mm camera. We spotted it in a pawn shop. It was a Petri and it took every penny we saved to buy it.
Nile, by this time, was old enough to pick up hay with me and together we both agreed the camera was worth every drop of sweat we gave to get it.
By the time I was in high school I was teaching photography in my yearbook class at Topeka West. Nile too, was teaching photography in Mr. Sandlin’s photography class. During my 4th hour, I could be found at the school library processing color slide film for our librarian Mike Printz. Mike believed in young people and did so by guiding students in oral history projects that he coordinated with the Kansas Historical Society. I was their photo lab technician for their projects. Photography became an incredible medium of expressing my feelings to others.
I would take pictures of everything. I would try out different films, papers, and processes in the darkroom which I shared with a washer, a dryer, and a deep freeze. OK, my darkroom was really our utility room and the film washing station was our bathroom sink.
One of our more memorable photos we shot was by pure accident. My brother and I thought it would be a really cool idea to lay the camera on the floor with the lens facing the ceiling and open the shutter for a long exposure. Suspended above the camera was a penlight flashlight that we took turns swinging in different rotating patterns. After processing the film, we discovered some very unusual images. Here is a picture of one of the best images.
I loved my hobby. I loved my hobby so much that I got a job working at Dillon's grocery store to help pay for the expensive paper and chemicals needed to do it.
Throughout the years, family and friends also supported my hobby by giving me rolls of black and white film they shot on vacation for me to develop and print. Sometimes my assignments were old torn photographs for me to copy and repair.
Most of my learning came from a book series from Time-Life called “Life Library of Photography”. Every month, like magic (plus $21.00 of my hard earned cash) a book came mailed to me for a total of 18 books plus yearly updates of new innovations in photography. What an incredible set of teaching tools I had at my fingertips. I spend hours reading and practicing what this set of books offered.
My first big job in photography happened in 1980 photographing cheerleaders for National Cheerleading Association. The pay was great for at least for the summer months. I was so excited, unfortunately, by November the money ran out. I didn't know what to do. I called my dad and explained to him my situation and he loaned me $800 to help me make it through the next few months. During this time of need I found a book called 1980 Photographer’s Market which connects photographers to businesses who need pictures. Inside the book there was a section about photographic services used by hospitals. Among the services listed was the need of B&W film processing for news releases.
I felt that I knew enough about B&W, so I decided to try and solicit my abilities to Providence - St. Margaret Hospital. It was close to home and I was becoming desperate. I don't know what the marketing director, Therese Horvat, saw in me at the time, but I am very grateful she did. Therese gave to me my very first roll of film to process. Yes, I was green in knowing business practices, but Therese saw beyond all that and believed in my ability to process the hospital's film. After a few months of processing film, I received a phone call from Therese. This time, however, it was not to pick up film, but instead she asked me if I would be interested in shooting a job. I realized then, as I do today, that all my wonderful learning of black and white film and darkroom picture making was a valuable asset to my business success. It has been the very life blood of my career.
Here it is in 2026 and I am rewriting my business story. B&W processing has long since been retired but the lessons learned are still alive and well today. I own one of the finest film scanners in the world to keep all my old negatives and slides alive. I also purchased a high-end 8mm / super8 film scanner to revive old home movies for viewing and safe keeping. The last of my business practices that remain is the copying and restoring of old photographs for people and museums. The restoration processes that I use are still the same techniques and skills I learned as a teenager in my old darkroom days.
When I am not working on some photographic project you might see me out and about riding my bicycle on the streets of Kansas City. I owe all I have to my life in Jesus Christ; my marriage to Tammy Carver (Stude), my wonderful children and their spouses, and a fantastic career in photography. What more can a man ask for? Well, maybe one more vinyl album for my record collection hanging on the living room wall!
Thank you for your time spent reading about my life as a photographer at Marc Carver Photography. God Bless.
