Elizabeth Hendrickson/MDN Cutter Flory, owner of Rainbow Photo Lab, stands next to a machine for printing enlarged images and banners.

Cutter Flory has owned and operated Rainbow Photo Lab in Minot since December 2020, when he took over a more than 40 year old business.

Bill and Marie Leonard started Rainbow Photo Lab in October 1977.

“We were one of the first one-day labs in North Dakota at the time. After we started, then one-hour photo came along about 1981 and we got into that also. We had four different locations in Dakota Square over a 28-year period,” Bill Leonard said in an interview published in the Jan. 2, 2020, edition of The Minot Daily News.

The store’s original location was in the Midwest Plaza at 212 South Broadway. Today, it is located at 215 11th Avenue SW, directly across from the Scandinavian Heritage Park.

The Leonards owned Rainbow Photo Lab for 42 years before deciding to retire, but they wanted to make sure they found the right owner to take over the business. They also said they would teach the new owner the business if needed.

Flory and his mother came into the store one day looking for lenses after Flory had moved home from college. He was attending classes at Full Sail University outside of Orlando, Florida.

“I went to college for videography. I wanted to be behind commercials, big movies, all of it. When COVID hit, the university closed and I had to finish my degree online, which sucked because I had gone down there for the hands-on experience,” Flory said. “When I came back I had no idea what to do. I came into the store to see if Bill had some lenses. I saw he was selling the business so I talked to my mom about it and she pushed me to buy the business. I wouldn’t be here without her.”

When people enter the store they will see all of the different machines that go into the process behind restoring and printing photos. As well as the machines for production use, the store has older cameras on display along a store wall.

Flory offers a variety of services, including photo restoration, scanning photos and negatives, photo printing and enlargements, film processing, canvas, posters and banners, prints on metal, prints from phones, sales of film and disposable cameras, passport and business photo sittings and sport team photos. He also offers video transfer, 16mm’s transferred to DVD or USB and slides and negatives put on CDs and DVDs.

“It’s so cool to see people get so excited over the pictures or laugh at the hilarious videos they have forgotten about,” Flory said.

In preparation for graduation time, Flory also does graduation announcement designs.

“That’s kind of one of my favorite things to do is just put things together. So, like editing, graphic design – I love doing all of that stuff,” he said.

Digital photography has become widely popular over the years, but Flory said people still bring in film all the time.

“People seem to be bringing a bunch of those all of a sudden. I still think it’s kind of a cool deal that I’m the only one in the state that still develops 35mm film in-house,” he said.