At just 15 years of age, Brian Murray rode a bicycle to photograph his first wedding. Shooting black and white film in a Rolleicord camera, upon returning home he developed and printed the films by hand. In 1959 Brian opened Murray Studios focused on weddings and portraits, still processing and printing black and white images in house, by hand. The studio expanded and with arrival of colour process, keeping up with developing and printing for the studio was taking up most of a working week.

In 1968 to solve this problem Brian bought what would be the first of many Kodak printers; This first one cost 10 times the price of a good house in the day. Now with spare capacity from this fast printer there was an oppourtunity to print work for other friendly photographers in the region; So photograhers started sending work, and the Horsham Colour Lab begins in the back room of Murray Studios. Over the comming years this lab would serve nearly every professional photographer in Western Victoria and beyond.

Beginning with the shift to minilab printing in the 70s the lab has continually embraced new techqniues and machinery with more than 15 different optical printers over 30 years. Through the 90s the lab made the transition to digital printing, installing both large format and high speed digital printers. Film scanning, retouching and digital workflow for both customers and internally became a focus. This enabled a much wider range of products and a much lower cost to photographers.

As we look to the future we anticipate less tradtional silver halide products and more printing using other devices and techniques. Yet we’ll continue to apply the same focused approach to colour fidelity and quailty which we’ve been using for 50 years. Our goal as always is to provide new products at a quality and price that you can’t achieve at home or in a studio enabling your business to better serve your customers as you partner with HC Pro.