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| Kodak Retina I - Image From Ken Rockwell.com This was my first camera. All manual!!! |
Well the long anticipated
announcement of Kodak corporation's bankruptcy has become a reality. The above
link will take you to the basic facts of the bankruptcy filing. For those of us
who grew up with photography and film or still still use film for some of our
business or artistic work this is more bad news. How bad this is and what
impact it will truly have will shake out over time. Without having any first
hand knowledge or detailed announcements yet from the company about product
production or availability it is safe to say that it is almost certainly going
to mean some future changes. American Airlines, one of the latest bankruptcies
is now reducing flights on unprofitable routes. Kodak will do the equivalent.
This was likely a long time coming and so many factors have contributed. The
radical very real growth of digital imaging, the speed that digital photography
transformed into a high quality medium, the Internet, consumer convenience,
poor corporate decision making, a global recession and increased capital
standards by lenders where likely all factors. Still it is sad to see this
iconic brand of a company faced with such a humiliating situation. Kodak, love
them or hate them, have been an icon of the photography industry and of the
American industrial landscape for all of my 50 plus years of life. My first
direct experience with their products was as a junior high school kid shooting
my first 35mm film with my father's Kodak Retina camera. A camera he picked up
during his time in Germany during WW II. I was hooked and shortly after that my
dad and I built a home darkroom developing Tri-X and Plus-X film in the
basement of my parents house. Shooting pictures for the high school year book
and experimenting in photography all through high school. Then taking
photography again during architecture school. Photography and imaging, seemed
to be there either as snap shots at family events, of finished projects at work
or as art unto itself for its own sake. Kodak was always the primary provider
of the consumable materials.
But then digital became all the rage
and justifiably so. With the Internet everything changed. Photography
transformed but so also did almost everything else from the analog world into new
digital. Graphics, music, photography, architecture, banking, medicine,
publishing, news they all have seen radical transformation as part of this
virtual digital revolution. Ones and zeros. Who would have ever anticipated the
impact of these changes 20 years ago. Possibly Nicholas Negroponte at MIT but
not most of the rest of us. Certainly not the business leaders of Kodak well or
maybe they did (read to the end). The death of the consumer film industry
happened suddenly for Kodak and many others. If I am an example one day I was shooting film and taking it to Walgreens. The next day I was taking digital shots with my pocket sized Di Image and printing them from my network printer. I did no look back at all for a long time. For the next 10-15 years my film
cameras were in the storage box replaced by several, ever improving versions of
digital cameras. Remember the old Sony Mavica which capture images on a CD ROM?
Or Minolta's Di Image cameras? Today I still shoot a lot of digital images with
Nikon DSLRs. But look at the Sony NEX 7 to see how far, how small and how high
quality, 24 mega pixels, consumer digital cameras have come. Today I shoot way
more digital photos then I ever did film images, thousands in fact and almost
every human with a cell phone has a digital camera at their beck and call. It
is convenient and once the camera is paid for the images are free. Yes you still must pay for
printing but I know that I print a very small percentage of the images I shoot
and hey I can post them out here on my blog for people to see and yet it
is.....FREE! Digital is more ubiquitous then ever and digital photography is
not going away any time soon. Or until something better comes along. But that
is what happened to Kodak. Something better, very much better came along. Not
better in quality per say but better in convenience.
But here I was needing something
more. Larger images, better quality and after researching it seemed that film
might provide an option. We could not afford a professional and I had a long
history with photography. I did not have the high end digital equipment but did
have the knowledge and experience to go "old school with film. I needed or
wanted high quality images, material cost per didn't matter as long as it was
less then the cost of renting high end digital equipment shot. I only needed so
many shots and could deal with the "inconvenience" as this is not a
profit center for our company.
I had only just returned to film
photography at the end of last year and for this very specific reason. I was
going to start using a large format 4x5 Sinar F2 camera to photograph some of
our finished projects, scan them with a flat bed scanner and have an
alternative 100 mega pixel set up. Large format film was the standard for
architectural photography for decades and it seemed to offer a very real
alternative to buying or renting very expensive high end digital
cameras/sensors. I have time and knowledge but am limited on money. Large
format film is a "huge" capture surface by comparison, even when
compared to the largest best professional equipment. It has properties that are
still hard to match even today with the best digital equipment. But as I ramped
back into the process and relearned techniques, dusting off knowledge that was
long before stored away I realized quickly that the film industry had declined
far more then I would have every expected. I found this out the first time I
went to buy color transparency or "positive" film. Finding that the
old standard Ektichrome was not immediately available. After some some work and
some waiting I could locate E100g it's new cousin but availability was spotty
and limited. Going on line however I quickly realized that Kodak, Fuji and all
the film industry and analog products were in a significant state of
transformation. Financial problems abounded and product cancellations abounded.
Only a few like Kodachrome made the news. Typically the product would just
disappear. Information boards are filled with rumors and panic.
The Kodak announcement is no
surprise. Those of us who still want to use film as an option can only hope that
they will figure out how to scale production down to make it profitable in
smaller runs. Or sell the formula to someone else who will. It is unlikely that
volume will ever require running whole plants dedicated to single products or
product types. If all goes well production by Kodak or someone else will
continue for a number of products color, black and white, movie, sheet film,
roll film etc. If they don't manage the bankruptcy well they may end up the way
of Polaroid with desired and desirable products just dying. Let us hope for a
different conclusion. Apparently a Polaroid pissed off employees where shoving equipment out of second floor loading doors of the plant destroying it thus preventing any future buyer from ever being able to realize a value.
Before you basj Kodak too badly you should
first remember that from high in the sky the ground is a long way off. The peak year of film production was apparently 2002. Think about that. In only 10 years a whole process became commercially obsolete! Kodak
invented, innovated, created, marketed and profited as a giant for a very long
time. The decisions that likely lead to bankruptcy where very likely made at
the same time GM was making really bad decisions that lead to their, once
unimaginable, bankruptcy. If anyone asks you who invented the digital camera
sensor you should tell them. Eastman Kodak of Rochester NY in the good old USA The inventor of the digital camera or CCD sensor
See the information boards at Large Format photograpy and Annalog phototgraphy (APHUG) for more infomration on product availablity and alternatives. I hope film remains available but time and change marchs on!!!
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