After 50 years of being a fixture in Winnipeg’s photography and business community, Photo Central will be merging with Don’s Photo after an extensive sale process. The longstanding location at the corner of Portage Avenue and Lipton Street in Winnipeg’s West End will continue to offer service to photographers with the same staff on hand to help assist customers in preserving life’s highlights and capturing timeless memories. For Photo Central's owner, Andrew Toews, those memories include the history of the store itself. “Some of my earliest memories as a child, of course, come from the old building back when we were downtown on Notre Dame,” Toews reminisced in an interview on Morning Light. .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; } Toews has been reflecting on those memories a lot this year. The process of selling the store came at the same time as the passing of his father, Dick, who founded Photo Central back in 1975. Toews’ own family got its start in the store when his future wife walked in to buy a camera. “She thought she was buying a camera,” Toews quips, “and ended up with the whole store and a lot more besides.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Don's Photo+The Print Refinery (@donsphotoltd) In addition to the many memories, Toews has also been reflecting on the things that he will miss most about the store, which inevitably comes back to the people. “I had a wonderful staff,” he says, noting that the hardest part of selling the business was informing his team, even though their services are being retained by Don’s Photo. “The thing I heard more and more and most often was that the hardest part of running a business is dealing with the staff and all the issues that can come up. And that is very true – there's a lot that can happen within a group of people. But the relationships I had with staff were fantastic, and the energy that they put into me, what they were willing to give me of their lives, it’s not insignificant.” The importance of people and community is the constant that Toews will take with him into the next chapter of his and his family’s life. “Always invest in people,” he offers. “Everything that I have of positive quality, of positive result in my life comes from getting out of people what I’ve put in. And I don’t say that in any sort of transactional way, but simply to build relationships, to care for those around us, those relationships will carry you in so many different ways and, hopefully, you can also reciprocate that to others.”