Bay Photo Lab Brand Guidelines: A 1976 Santa Cruz Darkroom Turned Scotts Valley Print Lab

A storage space, black plastic sheeting and a print business.

Bay Photo Lab began in Santa Cruz, California, in 1976. The company’s own timeline puts its start in one line: a knack for the darkroom became a business. Its fiftieth-anniversary pages name the founder as Larry Abitbol, a photographer who, the company says, came back to Santa Cruz after three months of travelling and shooting, found a storage space and built a darkroom inside it from lengths of timber and black plastic sheeting. That improvised room is the origin story Bay Photo tells about itself, and its anniversary archive sets it beside an image of the original Bay Photo logo.

The early business was a local one. According to the company’s archive, Abitbol turned towards the processing side of photography, and the lab grew into a set of storefronts around the Monterey Bay: a site the company calls “the Red Building,” which offered film processing, prints, hand retouching, custom black-and-white work and Type R prints; an old petrol station in Salinas that was converted into a shop; and an “Eastside Store” in Santa Cruz, which the archive describes as one of five locations the company grew into across the region. The timeline says the 1980s brought processing for weddings, portraits and one-hour photo work, and that in the 1990s printing and scanning went digital, which raised the volume of photographic prints the lab produced.

Between 2001 and 2003, the company says, it moved into a larger space and opened a fully digital printing lab. Its timeline dates the launch of ROES, the Remote Order Entry System that lets photographers prepare and send orders from their own computers, to 2003, and adds press-printed cards, calendars, books and albums between 2004 and 2006. In 2009, Bay Photo says, it created ThinWraps, a thin mounted print, and began the big push behind MetalPrints, photographs printed onto aluminium panels, a line it now lists among its most-ordered products.

Disc Drive, Scotts Valley.

The move that changed the company’s scale came in the early 2010s. The Press Banner, the weekly newspaper of Scotts Valley and the San Lorenzo Valley, reported on 28 February 2013 that Bay Photo had moved into buildings on Disc Drive left empty when the disk-drive maker Seagate pulled out of Scotts Valley in 2011. The paper said the company had spent a year and a half on an expansion and remodel on a 17-acre site, and that the architect David Zulim had joined two Seagate-era buildings with a 9,000-square-foot addition to make one large space for photo printing and finishing. That building became Bay Photo’s main production site and its corporate headquarters.

The same report described what the new building made. A digital operations manager told the paper that the headquarters housed 200 employees and produced photographic prints, press-printed products, metal prints, thin wraps, gallery wraps, fine-art giclée prints, albums and books. Before the move, the Press Banner said, Bay Photo had worked from Delaware Street on the west side of Santa Cruz and had been forced to rent extra room in the former Wrigley building; the need for more space drove the move. The new site was not designed as a shop: the paper reported that the company’s two retail locations, in Santa Cruz and Soquel, and the only division of the business still processing film, would stay open. Larry Abitbol, named as the company’s president, told the paper that Bay Photo had tried to use local firms wherever it could, among them Slatter Construction of Santa Cruz.

The company’s own timeline places the Scotts Valley move in 2013–2015, alongside new acrylic prints, the Xpozer display system and a wider choice of fine-art papers. It lists an online ordering system launched in 2016; Dream Prints, foil cards and curved MetalPrints in 2017; larger photo prints and albums, custom sizes for wood and acrylic prints, and the Clusters & Splits wall groupings in 2018–2019; and Textured MetalPrints, Epic Prints and a Signature Pen in 2020–2021. Bay Photo says the Epic Print, a large-format print with a resolution of up to 610 dpi, is its own invention.

How professional labs present themselves.

Professional photo labs and film-processing labs sit between the photographer and the finished object. Most present themselves chiefly through the print: the paper it is made on, the process that made it and the size it comes in. Lab websites typically sort their catalogues by paper surface — glossy, lustre, matt, pearl or metallic — and separate photographic prints exposed on light-sensitive paper from inkjet or giclée prints made for fine-art work.

Around the print sit albums, photo books, cards and wall pieces. Labs name these ranges plainly, usually by material and construction: lay-flat books, hard and soft covers, mounted prints, framed prints, acrylic, metal and wood. Film labs add a second vocabulary of development and scanning, listing film formats, scan resolutions and turnaround times so that a photographer can compare one service with another before sending a roll.

Ordering is part of the brand. Many labs describe their software in practical terms: a web editor for families, a mobile app for quick prints, and downloadable ordering programs or proofing tools for professionals who send large batches. Service promises — remakes, colour correction, shipping deadlines and guarantees — are usually written as short named policies rather than long explanations.

Corporate pages tend to carry the history. Labs that began as a single printer or a small darkroom often tell that story in their About pages, alongside the names of their owners, the towns where their production sits and any group they now belong to. For a design reader, the category is a study in restraint: the identity frames the customer’s pictures and names the materials, and it rarely competes with the images it prints.

Fifty years of a working lab.

Today Bay Photo presents itself as a lab for professionals rather than a consumer service. Its about page calls it “the print lab Professional Photographers trust” and says it has served photographers and artists since 1976. Its product menu is grouped into prints, wall art, tabletop pieces, albums and books, cards and calendars, and proofing products, with album ranges named Pacific Albums, Sunrise Albums and BayBooks. Photographers can order through the website, through the Bay ROES desktop software or the Bay Designer tool, or through partner gallery software, and the company also offers retouching and film services. The company says each order is made by trained technicians and inspected at several points along the way.

In 2026 the company marked its fiftieth year. Its anniversary page describes a gala held on 24 April 2026 in a hangar at Alameda Point, across the bay from San Francisco, which the company says sold out, with ticket proceeds given to the West End Arts District, and an exhibition of ocean and surf photography printed by the lab. The same page carries short notes from long-serving staff, several of whom count their time at the company in decades, and a run of archive images showing how the lab’s logo changed from one decade to the next.

For a design guide, Bay Photo Lab shows how a professional lab can build a brand from its own history and a set of named product lines rather than from a single mark. Compare WHCC, a Minnesota lab founded two years later, and Richard Photo Lab, another California lab. For this guide we use a deep Pacific teal, darkroom black, fog grey and a warm sandstone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bay Photo Lab’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.