Remember when you had to go buy a disposable camera and get your photos developed by a stranger? Well, the people who used to do that developing haven’t forgotten. Probably because they saw so many weird and crazy photos.
This piece is based on an AskReddit thread. Link on the last page.
1. I used to work on a cruise ship developing film. Some guy would get films sent from his wife that we would develop.
Some of them were pretty raunchy. We assumed she used a timer to take these. But in one set of shots there was a mirror in the background. We could see that the pictures were actually being taken by their 11 or 12-year-old son.
[Anonymous]
2. A guy comes in saying he wants to pick up his photos, so as usual we take his name and go to the drawer to look for them.
“Hmm, nothing there by that name” I say, “Perhaps another name?”
“No” he says, so I asked when he brought the film in to be developed.
“It was a disposable camera” says the guy. I say, “okay, so when did you bring in the camera to be developed?”
“IT WAS A DISPOSABLE CAMERA” he says.
After a bit of toing and froing, turns out he took the term “disposable camera” literally, so threw it in the bin right after using it. When I asked him how he expected the photos to get to us from the bin, he said “I dunno, satellites or something?”
onaretrotip
3. When I was about 16-17 I worked for CVS as a photo tech. I once had aroll that was a series of trophy pictures of naked women laying all inthe same bed. The problem is I knew some of them were definitely under 18 as I went to highschool with them. (continued…)
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So Itold my manager she needed to take a look at this and she said when theguy came in that she wanted to talk to him. I called him, told him hisrolls were all set and when he came in she had cops waiting for him.
Levetus
4. I develop film right now. We got my favorite thing recently.
Sowhen you look through a roll, you get some idea of a story. We got oneroll recently. Paris vacation, shots of the Eiffel Tower, and so on.Then guy snorting cocaine in his hotel room, then 3 shots later, it’shim in his underwear, in that same hotel room, holding a goat’s head.The flash was on too, so the goat’s eyes are glowing. No context,nothing. I love it.
redisforever
5. I made some poor soul develop pics of me posed as Rose from The Titanic. Fully nude, jewelry and all.
I’m a dude.
Raezek_Am
6. Use to develop film from a prison. They’d give the inmates disposablecameras for some reason. I think they were instructed to take picturesof their friends so the inmates would reveal who’s in what gang, idk.Any-who, between pictures of dudes making gang signs and posing ingroups there would be pictures of finger-paintings, which I thought waskind of sweet.
TheMapleMilitia
7. Iworked at a retail store that you could pick up your packs of photosfrom a large bin. Occasionally there would be a torn pack and a couplephotos would fall out between the inventory truck and the customerpickup bin.
Onesuch time, it was the photo index card that I found on the ground.Picked it up and looked at it. Showed a sequence of pictures: somegrandma’s birthday party, kids playing, the (presumably) mom naked, themom and dude having sex, random family gathering and portraits, andthen a Thanksgiving.
uncomfortablechuckle
8. Back in high school I worked at a photo lab. I come in one day, grab aroll, and start doing my thing just like I did every day. The firstroll I grabbed had the most convincing UFO pictures I had ever seen. (continued…)
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Seriously.These photos looked real. There were even 2 or 3 with what appeared tobe an Alien in a field, again, like nothing I’ve ever seen. No Sci-fican compete with what I saw in those few pictures.
Not5 minutes later a man walks in asking for the photos I just developed.I hand them to him and he leans in real serious and asks me, “Did yalook at em?” I jokingly said, “Sir, I don’t have time to look at halfthe pictures we develop.” Then he paid me and left.
9soft
9. So my Aunt has a picture of her and her kids in front of their farmhouse. Unfortunately, she accidentally super-imposed the picture of hermother-in-law in her funeral casket so she was hovering in the skyabove her grandchildren. My cousin called it “Grandma Levitating,” andmy Aunt had it in her house for years.
uponroses
10. Neverworked with physical film other than to box it up to ship to Fujifilm,but a good part of my job right now is printing people’s photo orders.Most of it is pretty boring and typical…occasional sexy selfies orthe guy with the BBW fetish.
Andthen there was the time a few weeks ago I printed a picture of a guylaying in the middle of the street, head blown off and brains strewneverywhere.
The kicker to me was that it was mixed in with otherinnocent pictures of kids and scenery…and then, suddenly, brains.
meltedsnowflake
11. The best one was the dude who decided to take a picture of his penis ina hot dog bun (no, that is not an innuendo). He did not fill the bunout.
Spritzup
12. Had a guy drop off a roll of film that he said he found and had no idea what was on it. That’s not exactly encouraging. I knew I had to take a look at this one. (continued…)
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Developed it and it was almost like a frame-by-frame of a couch in themiddle of a junkyard with two guys pouring gasoline on it and lightingit on fire. When he came to pick it up he was baffled, because he wasone of the guys in the photo but had no recollection of that day.
Karismatikally
13. I work in a lab now. We have a guy who goes to places like Guatemala,following the death squads around, amazing photos, and that’s like 75%of his rolls. The other 25% is kids playing soccer in the streetsthere. Equally amazing shots, great photographer, just kinda weird togo from scanning random vacation shots to pools of blood on the groundand then kids playing.
redisforever
14. I worked on a photo desk in a supermarket for 3 years. The craziest oneI ever had was when a guy asked asked to print off his wedding picturesfrom his phone. He didn’t realize he’d selected everything on there tobe printed, and ended up with a bunch of printouts of him getting it onwith another guy just before the wedding.
KroganSushi95
15. When I was in the Navy I had a disposable camera, now submariners arecrazy, so I left the camera in the sonar shack. Well when we pulledinto port I sent the camera off to my wife to develop. She told me thatthey wouldn’t develop all the pictures, my shipmates had taken a bunchof pictures of their junk.
user_name_unknown
16. Back in the early 90s our grocery store developed film. One pic made nosense in the negative, but when printed produced a point of view shotof a guy having sex with a handbag. You could see all the miscellaneouspurse contents wrapped around his junk
hadria
17. I used to be a tech in a one hour photo lab, back when we still processed the film in the store.
Someyears back I had a customer bring in a couple of rolls of film and makeme promise to delete them from our machine’s archives when they weredone. (continued…)
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Theimages were from Sept. 11, 2001. This guy was there and took picturesof the towers as they burned, but waited nearly a decade to get themdeveloped. So I was the first and likely one of the few people who willever see those particular photos of that day. True to my word I nevershared them with anyone (yes, we do share crazy pictures with ourcoworkers), but I still remember them.
Makesyou wonder how many photos like that exist in the world. Unfortunatelyhe’d waited too long to develop them, so some of the pictures werelost, as negatives are sensitive and can easily be damaged over timedue to x-ray, heat, moisture, or light exposure.
Cymras
18. Ihaven’t personally experienced anything weird (other than seeing about1/3 of a dick in one pic), my lab manager has told me though that he’sseen some weird shit in his day.
Onetime he had a woman develop some photos, which included shots of her inlingerie. After the photos were developed and handed to her, the womanasks my manager, in a kind of embarrassed voice, “did you see any ofthe photos?” After saying he did, she leaned in a little close andwhispered “…did you like them?”
dandaman64
19. We had a client who always brought rolls of what looked like mediocrequality nude model pics. Not the girls, but the photographic quality.They were on a basic white background. They were the formulaic poses,and the girls didn’t look particularly stoked to be there.
One day, hebrings three rolls in and we get to developing. It’s myself and myfriend in the shop at the time and I was on the printer. The threerolls were of two women, a bunch of individual pics, and some together.Their demeanor seemed to go downhill as their state of undressincreased; smiling to sad to almost blank.
I got a bad feeling andshowed my friend. She said she’d developed some the others the previousday that looked off too. Luckily he hadn’t picked them up when hedropped these off. The girls looked drugged. We immediately called thecops (it was a one hour job.) Luckily, they got there before he did.
Our boss was pissed that we breached client confidentiality. When thearticle came out three days later that he’d drug girls, photographthem, and then sexually molest them (including some who were 15 and16,) I felt vindicated. And guilty that I hadn’t paid more attentionbefore.
special_mcspecialton
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20. Iworked at a camera store in my high schools and college days, and wehad a photo lab in the back… It was a college town and so there wereplenty of photos of young adults exploring their sexuality, etc. Inever saw anything that I considered inappropriate. We did have acardboard cover for the machine output hopper so that people wouldn’tsee any photos of nudity and get upset.
However,the most memorable images I remember printing were from 1989, from theTienanmen Square riots. You know, the man holding up the line of tanks(The Tank Man)? And the 200+ people who were killed? It was a big dealin world at that time, and especially in college towns for a fewreasons.
First,the protesters were mostly college-aged Chinese. Second, there were alot of Chinese grad students on campuses in the US, and they feltdeeply impacted by this. Many knew people protesting in China.
Wehad students coming into the store with photos they took off the TVscreen so they could reproduce them in the hundreds to send back toChina to circumvent the regime’s oppressive control of the media.
I’ll never forget those events, and the students desire to do their part, even through they were 1/2 the world away.
mjmdriver
21. There was onesuper sleazy guy who used to come in and print photos on the instantkiosks. Most of the pictures he printed were girls of questionablelegality, posing but not nude. He claimed to be a photographer, but hewas gross and gave off a really creepy vibe. I showed my manager a fewof the pictures he happened to leave behind one day and got him bannedfrom our photo lab, but there was nothing else we could do about it.
Byand large though, most photos weren’t all that memorable. 99% of peoplesuck at taking pictures. My least favorites were those disposablecameras people would leave on the tables at wedding receptions.
Guaranteed I’d spend an entire night developing 30 rolls of absolutegarbo pictures, so boring. Those and underwater disposables, totalwaste of money, but at least they were fun to pop open. I used to seehow far I could get the little plastic shutter to launch across the lab.
Cymas