Scandal at the Local Photo Store

These days, everyone has a digital camera. Camera's on computers, in cel phones. Pretty much anyone can take a sexy picture of themselves. And pretty much, at some point in a romantic relationship, someone takes a sexy picture to send to their lover. There's a new modern danger in this: leaving your email open, letting someone borrow your phone, or getting it stollen. 

As possible as it is to get your sexy images lifted and distributed these days, it still doesn't seem even half as risky as in the pre-digital era. Back then, film came in rolls, and each roll could capture 12, 24, 0r 36 images. You clicked, and hoped the image would come out. You couldn't just look and see, and delete and take another. It was a calculated guess at best.  

Next, with the roll of film all exposed, you'd take it to the lab. Just before the digital revolution, at the very end of the film era, the big box stores would develop your film: Costco, Kmart, Walmart, etc. You could, in theory, drop off your film, maybe even under a made up name, and then let it disappear to some  mega lab somewhere else, and come back a week later. You could tell yourself that no one you knew saw the photos of you, just some lab tech somewhere else. 

But before the mega-stores, photo labs were local. Often, you'd take your film into a corner store, and hand it directly to the guy who would in 5 minutes, pull your roll and process it right there. In smaller towns, you knew this guy, at least by first name. This guy would process all your photos: family vacations, weddings, graduations, and even the most mundane things like the shot of a tree that came down on your roof and you needed a photo for the insurance file. These photo lab owners had a total window into the day-to-day lives of the town. 

And so, it seemed extraordinarily daring for someone to take a camera, work out the manual controls to expose the image properly, shoot explicit images of themselves, and then march the roll of film downtown to the local camera store and hand it over to the man who would develop it, frame by frame, and in a couple hours, hand it right back to you, looking at you, and telling you the price, and you try not to blush and hand over the money and get out as fast as you can.

Now that took guts.