About Us

In 1995, KPL had outgrown our original building next to Ellis Flower Shop (which happened to be a historic cabin from the early 1900's), where Old National Bank now resides. With the addition of new equipment and KPL's quickly growing services, the business moved a few blocks to E. 3rd Street. Our E. 3rd Street location served us well for seven years; we expanded into matting and framing, gained the ability to begin shooting studio portraits, and expanded our team sports photos from little leagues through Collegiate sports.

KPL was at the forefront of the digital era as we transitioned from traditional roll film to digital photography. We were one of the first Labs in the state of Indiana began to shoot all digital, which allowed the business to offer higher quality photo editing, retouching, and we began producing sports collages, banners, and other custom media for our customers.

As the digital era continued to transform the way we work, it became time for yet another move to W. 3rd Street. With this move, we let go of our traditional side and evolved to be a completely digital photo lab and ended our dark room service. At our W. 3rd location, technology had evolved to the point that our digital printers produced the same quality of work as the traditional methods in half the time. As we made the challenging transition from our traditional methods, we were also able to add more schools and teams to our services and built out a large portrait studio with the ability to control every aspect of the environment, from backdrops to lights and green screens to digital implementation.

Our W. 3rd Street location was a pivotal point in the evolution of KPL; we said goodbye to some of our traditional methods including some of the artistic nature of having a dark room, but grew tremendously in the aesthetics and processing of our digital side. As we had done twice previously, we had now outgrown our current environment and found our new home back on Kirkwood Ave downtown, just across from Frame Makers in downtown Bloomington. This location provided new and different opportunities for portraits with an amazing staircase and beautiful Architectural elements to add composition to many of our portraits. KPL is grateful for the memories and history of that house.

With all old buildings, KPL reached a point where the digital and electrical requirements just couldn't keep up with our clients’ needs and we once again needed to find a space to better serve our clients. We moved to State Road 46 and expanded our studio again, creating a completely unique environment for our in-house portrait sessions. As we have done since purchasing the business in 1992, we responded to the environmental impact of photo printing and replaced all of our large industrial equipment with new printers that are completely green and consumes less power than our previous equipment.

Kirkwood Photo Lab has served Schools, Leagues, Families, Organizations and so much more from Indiana to Kentucky for 40 years. Kirkwood Photo Lab will continue to be in the Bloomington metro area to support our clients’ needs and we will continue to grow and evolve alongside our community just as we have from the time my boys were in little league.