In still another sign that the world I have always known is drawing to a close, Marvin's Camera Shop in Belleville has announced that it will shutter its business at the end of February.

The last few cameras I have owned have been purchased from Marvin's, a store that I really just stumbled onto several years ago.

They've been around since 1951, and even though current owner Roger Agne has operated the shop since the mid-1960's, the business still bears the name of his father, who founded it.

I gravitated towards Marvin's because of Roger, even though I never bothered to ask his name nor developed a personal relationship with him.

I simply told him what I did, and what I needed from a camera, and he outfitted me accordingly.

When you went into Marvin's, chances were that a couple of camera enthusiasts would be hanging around the counter, speaking a language I didn't really understand.

I had never really been around photography before I started in the newspaper business, nor was there much emphasis on pictures in The Sun at the time. The only pictures that appeared in the paper were those that were submitted by people in the community. We actually used a Polaroid camera for a while, then graduated to an instamatic film camera for a while.

Once I started shopping for a nicer camera, I tried the department stores and chain camera shops, but I never really knew if I was getting what I needed.

I started shopping at Marvin's when it became clear that digital photography was the wave of the future in the newspaper business, having been through film development and the making of halftones for reproduction, and later simply developing negatives and scanning them into our computer system.

Marvin's had the feel of an old-style photography shop. When a question was asked, the inevitable response was "let me get Roger." Agne would emerge from the back room, smelling of stop bath and often with the photography loupe still shoved into one squinted eye.

A lot of the shop's business was built on developing film negatives, and later reproducing photographic prints from digital images.

It's not that hard to connect the dots between that and the ultimate demise of the business itself. As Agne himself told a Belleville News-Democrat reporter last week, "Customers just don't print as many prints anymore. And now Kodak has filed for Chapter 11. That kind of speaks for itself."

Indeed it does. As much as the advent of digital photography has been a boon for consumers and a life raft for self-taught photographers like me, there's always an unfortunate someone at the bottom end of the latest wave of technology.

In visiting Marvin's over a period of years, it was obvious that Agne and the business were taking steps to evolve. At one point they installed photo kiosks to allow people to produce their own ink-jet prints. Agne became well-versed in the characteristics of digital cameras. His knowledge proved valuable to me on more than one occasion, but more than that I felt I could trust him.

He wasn't an especially personable man, but he laid out the facts in a noncommital way that made my decision-making easier. He never oversold me a camera, never tried to get me to buy more camera than I needed.

Many business transactions are conducted impersonally these days. In fact, it has become increasingly rare to even see a person when making a purchase now. Everything we do has to be faster, more efficient, cheaper, but that doesn't always make it better. Marvin's prices were higher than some, but if you had a problem you didn't have to call a customer service line or scan the FAQs on some website. All you had to do was ask for Roger.

For his part, the 62-year old Agne is taking the closing of his family business philosophically. It's not so much that he doesn't think he can compete in the modern world; rather, he chooses not to. It leads to a sobering question for businesses like ours, that are also built on personal service and customer care. Will we get to retirement, like Roger Agne, before we become extinct?