Some Sad Photographic News New 55 and Hedrich Blessing - Closed!

As anyone who visits my site knows my posting has become a lot more infrequent. Time commitments in my life have reduced the amount of available time for my photography interests. Today I came to check my site, look over links and generally make sure things were still working. In checking my inspiration and links section I discovered that during my absence two of my links had stopped working. The first was my link to New 55 Film. They were a start up Kickstarter company that was trying to bring to market a new peal apart instant film for 4x5 polaroid camera's.


I was very excited about the potential new product as there may be no manufacturers of instant film remaining. As a large format camera owner instant film was how I learned the craft of architectural photography. The process was fairly simple. Set up your shot. Take all the necessary preparations and then shoot some test shot with instant film. When Polaroid went out of business in pretty much destroyed the financial viability of the large format camera for many professionals as it requires some degree of certainty that you have the shots you want or are being paid to produce.


New 55 was a valiant effort to return an instant 4x5 film to the market and at the same time provide a viable negative along with a print. They had done it. They had gotten the product design pretty well in place and were delivering product. But the whole operation could never scaled up to move past a craft operation. For them to be financially viable as a going concern they needed to make production equipment that was more efficient, required less hand labor and had higher levels of consistency. Having watched them struggle and fail was sad especially in light of the analog resurgence that seems to be taking place elsewhere in such things ad vinyl records and typewriters.


I was also saddened to learn that the famous Hedrich Blessing photo studio in Chicago closed its doors. Several of it's remaining photographers have started a new studio but the legacy of world famous photographs from the famous Chicago company has sadly come to and end. The archives have been transferred and I have put a link up. See the information and inspiration section of the blog.


The photography market place continues to be one of ruthless change and competition. There is nothing standing still in this world, especially not in the photography industry.

Selling Equipment to Make Room for New Equipment to shoot LAX games!

Well it is Lacrosse Season again and time for me to switch my photography gear to sports and action. Last year I rented a Nikon 300mm 2.8 lens and found it a great addition. But renting lens' for a season is prohibitively expensive and time consuming. So I am hunting for a fast prime Nikon or Sigma 300mm f2.8 or a fast f2.8 Sigma zoom lens, Nikon mount, with a top end of 300mm to purchase and add to my sports kit. If I make enough from my sale I might add a tele-converter to the mix to get me even closer to the action when there is enough light.  My old Tokina f4.5  80-400 zoom just isn't fast enough nor does it focus fast enough. To raise cash for my purchase I am selling some of my less used gear. Please go to ebay and check out my listings if interested. I am selling my Sinar F, my Graflex Crown graphic (renovated) 4x5 press camera , my Nikon 28mm PC lens and more to follow. I have also added two old but good camera bodies,  a Nikon D2H and a Nikon D2Hs to my sports kit. Old professional bodies with small, 4 meg, sensors that once cost $5K each. Why? because they shoot at really fast frame rates 8 per second, create raw files that are a manageable size and are built likes tanks! Check out Ken Rockwell's website where he talks about them being the best value for sports and action photography because that is what they were designed to do. I have been shooting with the D2H and have been impressed. I have a new ebay purchse of a D2Hs on the way! Of course my Nikon D600 still makes way better images overall. But for these action shots that hardly ever get enlarged past screen size these old camera's seems to be a way to prevent having to run every image through Photoshop to get the file size down to something managable . The D2H is good but the D2Hs has a bigger big buffer that will allow me to almost continuously shoot images at 8 frames per second with metering and focus. To get that with a current size sensor you still have to drop at least 5K. Quick continuous frame rate...just the thing for capturing quick moving LAX action if the light is good. They don't do so well in low light. My Nikon D600 will still by my go to for shots under lights. As a D4 is just not in my price range!


Here are links to the ebay postings if you are interested:
Sinar F 4x5 kit with accessories and case: Sinar F for sale on Ebay
Nikon 28mm PC F3.5 lens:Nikon 28mm PC lens for sale on Ebay
Graflex Pacemaker Crown Graphic 4x5 Press Camera: Graflex Crown Graphic 4x5 Press camera for sale on Ebay

See the photos below. More images on Ebay!

Graflex Crown Graphic - Renovated 

Nikon 28mm PC Lens

Sinar F with Wide angle bellows and accessories 

Sinar F in case 

Sinar F Camera 

Focusing Screen Success - Cant wait to start taking photos

So the Cambo/Calumet ground glass focusing screen arrived and it works perfectly. It mounts without any additional modification to the revolving section of the Graflex Super Graphic camera back. I shot a couple of instant film images and the Fuji 405 instant film back insets and seats without issue. Something that it will not do with my Sinar F. So I am very happy about that. The Polaroid 4x5 film also inserts and seats without issue but since I am down to my last pack of Fuji FC100c45 film I won't matter. Well unless either the Impossible Project or New 55 starts to make film again that is actually 4x5.  Here are the photos of the new camera. I can't wait to load up some film holders and take it out into the field and take some photos. I will also be posting some photos of the beater Graflex Crown Graphic that I have. I am trying to decide if I am going to restore it or put it up on E-bay and unload it.

On another related front the older Soligor 1 degree Spot meter that I picked on E-bay for $15 is working and appears to be correct when tested against my digital cameras. It took a little creativity to solve the missing battery cover issue. But a little Yankee ingenuity to make a retainer spring clip to hold the hearing aid batteries in place and viola "success". My transportable, low cost (cheap!!!) 4x5 film, field camera set up is almost all together.

Front View Graflex Super Graphic Camera

Side View

View of Cambo Ground Glass focusing back with extra deep spring clips. Mounts perfectly where the missing Graflex back should normally mount.

Front View with camera bellows sliding back ready to be closed up.

All closed up. This makes a nice tidy package compared to my Sinar F. Much easier to put into a back pack.

The Cambo/Calumet focusing back easily mounts and removes without needing to modify the slide clips or other parts of the camera. It has enough depth to accept instant film backs and seems to work perfectly. The Super Graphic has more movements than older versions of the Graflex press camera with a sturdy aluminum box. Not all the bells and whistles that some field cameras have but also not the cost.

Looking for Smaller, Lighter, Easier

So I have embarked on a project to have a smaller, lighter, and easier camera to do 4x5 film photography. The camera I have been using is a Sinar F and while it is a dream of camera in terms of interchangeability of parts, amount of movements and quality it is just too heavy and slow for me to use when I am out in the field. As I looked at good field cameras I just wasn't going to spend a fortune so I have been bargain hunting on E-bay and am now the proud owner of an old really beat 1950's Graflex Crown Graphic and and a Super Graphic. The Super Graphic is missing its ground glass focus panel. The goal has been to find, at really low cost an alternative to the Sinar which I can keep in the car and take with me if I hike someplace with minimal gear. The Sinar while a great camera was never intended to go into the field unless it was manned by a crew. Once the prefect camera for shooting architecture and interiors but in those days the team consisted of a photographer and one or even two assistants.

I will post some photos of the cameras in there current conditions. If I decide to make the Crown into a fully working camera I will have to restore or re purpose it. The leatherette skin is shot, the bellows has holes in it and the overall camera is stained and dirty. I suspect it was in a flood or at the least stored in a garage or barn for many years given the accumulation of residue. But the price was right. It will require some TLC in any case.

The Super Graphic is in better overall working condition, the bellows is light tight, the movements all work and by being a Super, it gives me more of the movements I might expect had I actually gotten a real "field camera". Funny I don't find myself using that many movements even with the Sinar outdoors but we will see. I am curious to experiment with more selective focus and shallow depth of field and slower exposures. Something that I find problematic with digital cameras. The real problem with the Super Graphic is that it is missing the ground glass focus panel. Even if the rangefinder worked I can't seem myself handholding this or using it as my focus methdod. So solving that problem is paramount if it is going to really be a working camera. Graflex completely re-desinged these parts for the Super Graphic so the Graflock back from the Crown will not mount to the rotating back of the Super without removing the slider clips necessary for attaching roll film backs etc. I am presently awating a Cambo back which I have been told does mount to the Super's rotating back. So the journey commences.

All this because I still want to shoot "film" even thought my Nikon D600 cranks out really great, sharp, high resolution images that don't require any of the processing, scanning and photoshoping that is necessary to simply get a film image up on the web or printed. I don't have a real drakroom so my process is a hybrid of analog film and digtal. In the end I am hoping to still do really large prints. I have a good color plotter that prints up to 48" wide and I would like to create images that  hold together at that size. The Nikons full frame sensor gets me pretty close and it is a consumer grade semi pro piece of gear. In the past I would have needed a Leaf or Sinar digital back. But you can almost do it now with consumer grade equipment.  In the end this may still be a fools errand as color transparency film, labs

New55 Film: New55 and 20x24 demonstrate instant color 8x10 wit...

New55 Film: New55 and 20x24 demonstrate instant color 8x10 wit...

So I was googling around the Internet and found this link. It seems these guys are working on a totally new form of instant photographic film material. It produces positive images and negatives at the same time with little or no waist. Wow! Link to Flicker slide show of images

I will be doing more research into this. This would be a fantastic thing for those of us who would like to find a more logistically feasible analog photographic process that allows us to use our large format cameras!!

Kodak Bankruptcy

Kodak Bankruptcy Announcement

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!!!