Kodak on digital and film future

You put your finger on the problem: American _consumers_. Perhaps it is
time to concatenate that word: Americanconsumers, and replace "voter" with
the word. Don't most Americanconsumers vote with their wallet, or
something in the vicinity?

American society by its very physical layout has been a consequence of the
automobile and cheap petrol. Look to many European civilizations for
alternatives which function perfectly well without the same.

The electric car is not the issue. The issue is lack of alternatives to
the automobile itself: adequate, honorable, good public transportation,
delivery services, rational city and country layouts that naturally emerge
from a rational distribution of a scarce and dangerious resorce: petrol.

Petrol is priced artificially low in America. Period. Americans pay a lot
money in terms other than gasoline taxes to subsidize the political
protection racket neccesssary to protect oil overseas to make that fuel
source cheap here.

 

Which reminds me of the question; What is the difference between a C grade
at Harvard and a C grade at a public university? Answer: At the public
university, one has to _work_ for a C.

 

Hmmm, when I read this I picture you fitting right in with, say, Norway -
living a a gingerbread chalet 5 miles from town, uphill both ways, and
skiing to work... You would be photogenic if nothing else..

Denny - 5,000# FWD truck with a gun rack in the rear window and an airplane
with TWO engines...

 

This has been discussed at length before... Put a plastic bag in a pail...
Pour the old fixer into the bag and set it out to evaporate the water down
to powder.. Put the powder into an old paint can... By the time you are a
digital convert the can of powder can then be dropped off where ever old
paint buckets and solvents go in your town...
Denny

 

Darn, I missed that one... No wonder my pictures suck...


natural organic vegan spring water

 

It's only your opinion that I'm being condescending. I don't think
calling crap "crap" is condescending. I think I'm being honest I
don't think noting the difference between what snapshooters typically do
and what serious artists, amateurs, or professionals do is
condescending. Opinionated maybe, but that's what this forum is about,
opinion. And I'm not going to tread softly on Usenet...

I've been making prints for a long time. I know how to make a good
print. Machine prints are machine prints, whether photochemical or
digital and IMO they're crap. Now, maybe my opinions get bit boorish
(and whose don't after too long an argument that is simply getting
repetative...) Vis-a-vis, when I show my clients or potential clients
the *quality* of the large format work and custom prints I myself make,
rather than the usual mediocre, cheesey, machine print they previously
thought was "good" from their 35mm or digital snapshots from the amateur
lab they've used, well suffice it to say I don't have even use any
boorish adjective at all. It's plainly obvious.

Nonsense Dana. Serious photography is what does and always has driven
consumer amateur photography. Snapshooting consumers see, admire, and
try to imitate the work they see everyday in mass media done by
professionals and artists. It's where all photographic insiration comes
from -- viewing the work of others.

If you don't think so, go out and take some snapshots of anything and
see if any magazine, ad agency, gallery, or any other forum using
photography will actually publish imitative, mediocre snapshots or hang
them for all the world to see and be inspired by. Won't happen. *ALL*
the mass media images you, I, or anyone else sees in galleries,
magazines, advertisements, postcards, calendars, posters, movies, T.V.,
etc. etc., are "serious" images taken and produced by serious
photogrpahers who either get paid to make serious professional images or
do it for artistic reasons.

When the typical consumer see what photography is capable of (i.e.,
Ansel Adams or Richard Avedon), they also want to engage the medium
whether it's amateur photo night at the local high school or snapshots
of grandma and grandpa's 50th wedding anniversary. Since I've taught
photography to many amateur students, I know this is true.

Digital is an entirely different imaging medium. Sooner or later not
even the deliberate mass marketing of digital as "equal" to or "better"
than film imaging will be able to hide and obfuscate that fact. They
have different imaging abilities and different applications and always will.

To a certian extent, that may be true. The point is photochemical
imaging and artistry isn't dependent on mass market consumerism, as I've
patiently tried to explain. If Kodak discontinued all their films
tomorrow, it would survive and thrive.

The fact is, professional photographers and artists alike know it's both
a fallacy and suicide to trust their legacy of images to digital and is
why the majority insist on shooting film. The professional lab I've used
for years has almost gone completely digital. But 99% of all the work
they output on digital is on film, whether amateur or professional.

That's a fact.

And they can't. Not with any assuredness. It's the difference between
holding a real, tangible work of art in your hands you *know* you can
preserve or only having it as stored data on an even more fragile
electronic device that is subject to the ups and downs of technology and
mass market consumerism.

Apparently not long enough, since you don't get it.

Digital doesn't need to be impeached, simply acknowledge it's a
different medium with useful but different applications in the world of
imaging. It cannot do what film does, nor can optical photochemical
processes do some useful things digital does. The *problem* is in order
to make as much short term profit as they can, digital marketers and
manufacturers are piggy backing their medium on the established
photography market. They appropriate familar photographic terms and
package digital cameras in familiar SLR type bodies, but then obfuscate
the factual differences bewteen the mediums. When, pray tell, have you
ever been honestly informed by the manufacturers and marketers of
digital cameras of the Nyquist limitations (resolution) that plague and
will always plague digital lenses and sensors? This is a serious issue
consumers have yet to be told anything about. I have read fallacy after
fallacy of how digital is "superior" to film. It is, in fact, *DIGITAL*
that has made it's way in the world by fallaciously and speciously
impreaching the unique attributes of film imaging -- imaging abilities
digital cannot actually perform. The physics simply don't allow it. But
they don't tell consumers that; all they do is lie.

When people realize that they're not getting the same thing as they get
with film, including the permanance of a typical photochemical image,
they will relegate digital to it's proper place in imaging for those
applications it's inherently suited for. This has already happend on a
number of prominant occasions, such as when (relying on the utter B.S.
Henry Wilhelm keeps spouting for digital media longevity on behalf the
digital industry) the claimed "archival permanance" of Epson inkjet
papers and inks was discovered by the public to be a load of crap -- the
pictures output on them fading in months. The result has been several
prominant articles informing people they need to put their images on a
"safe" medium -- like traditional photochemical prints or on film.

Frankly, Dana, you just don't seem to be very well informed on this issue.

In fact (and I've done a fair amount of research into this...)
traditional photography and darkroom is *growing*. Particularly in
larger formats. It's not growing as fast as consumer digital, but in
fact consumer digital is essentially a gadget oriented market. A fad. It
won't grow at leaps and bounds forever; it'll reach an equilibrium. The
same thing happeded when George Eastman introduced the Brownie cameras.
All it did was encourage new interest in, and new markets for, mass
consumer photography. But it didn't impact traditional serious
photography in any meaningful way. If anything, it encouraged the new
era of "snapshooters" to try to imitate serious photography.

The only serious areas where digital has had any real impact is in those
areas where digital has a valid and useful application -- publishing.
News photographers and jouranalists shoot digital *only* because the
nature of their particular medium is suited to it, i.e., the ability to
transmit a newsworthy images from the event location to the editor
immediately. Timing is everything in news media.


Anmyway I somply can't continue to respond at length. So I'll have to
snip the rest.

 

Ha! Is that the kind you buy in the store where the naturally occuring
microscopic critters have been "sterilized," and filtered or do they go
out and drill their own wells!

 

But I don't resort to specious analogies that actually prove my point!

And why is that? If there was no oil there, we'd have little interest in
the middle east other than Israel. Two well known oil industry synonyms: Bush/Cheney.

Bull (sorry, I call 'em as I see 'em.) What Bush has done is *lessen*
our effective military presense in the rest of the world (we have a
small, volunteer army, ya know...) and increased the threat of terrorism
by shifting our military focus from the war on terrorism to engage in an
**unconstitutional** war against a pint sized murdering dictator -- who
was a bad man the UN should have dealt with -- but not a threat to any
US interests.

Bush/Cheney = oil/oil. Government by corporation is the Bush/Cheney motto.

I have little patience for nonsense, I guess

 

What -- no Subaru?

 

Actually I am norwegian (but drive a subaru. no gun rack. I could
maybe mount a bazooka on the top cargo rack...)

 

Mediocrity defined mathematically (statistically) Very informatical.

 

You must drill your own well, of course. You cannot be an artist by
purchasing it ready-made. That prevents the hand of the artist from
showing. The microscopic critters must not be sterilized: they provide
life to the image that sterilized ones cannot, just like in Yogourt.

I assume you coat your own plates using an emulsion of your own design.
You need not mine your own silver, but you should certainly make your
own silver nitrate by dissolving the silver in nitric acid. This
provides the secret artistic touch that the celestially high art
photographers use. It was a closely guarded secret until now.

 

shhhhh....

 

Sounds good. Just one question: how long does it take to evaporate, say, a
couple-three gallons of fixer this way? Does stuff grow in it? Could your kids
use it as a science experiment?

 

Actually, Oakland has a *very* aggressive anti-dumping effort going on,
complete with billboards and staff. The problem is (besides the city being
practically broke), it's difficult to impossible to catch the motherfuckers
who dump this stuff. (That term is actually too mild for these people, who
have a special section of Hell reserved for them.) Around the corner from
where I live is a place where they might as well just put up a sign--"CITY
DUMP ANNEX: NO FEES! DUMP WHATEVER YOU LIKE!". I've seen everthing here: just
in the last month, a cast-iron bathtub in the middle of the street, a deli
refrigerator, stoves, a pickup truck on blocks, plus a brand-new SUV (stolen)
that someone abandoned--and then set on fire! (Charred a utility pole and damn
near burned down the adjacent building.) For that last one, I'm only sorry I
didn't have my camera to get what would have been a great shot of the firemen
hosing it down in the middle of the night.

Plus there are hefty fines (> $1,000 for the first offense). They actually did
catch someone there a few months ago by doing a stakeout and calling in the
police, but that's the only way they'll ever catch these sons of bitches.

 

Depends where you live, in NM maybe a couple of days. Here on the East coast
you might try using a black 55 drum with a upside down pipe on the top
which lets water vapor out, and keeps rain water out.

 

Not much will grow in it...
The kids can't really hurt themselves...
Evaporation time depends on temperature, humidity, etc... A shallow tray
will evaporate faster than a deep bucket, etc...
When I rattle these 'solutions' off I tend to forget about people who live
in crowded city conditions, where it may not be practical...
Denny