Karl I, and I’m sure others would like to see some of your shots, esp. astronomy.

Cherry Springs PA surprisingly ranks very high on the Bortle Dark-Sky Scale; I have another site in Ohio that ranks just one level below ideal within driving distance.

Cherry Springs is an excellent place for camping…on a clear night, it’s fantastic.

I’m looking forward to this new tech – and doesn’t seem like it will be all that costly at launch.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/22/light....

Quote:

A Silicon Valley start-up called Lytro claims it's working on a consumer camera that uses light field technology to radically change the way we take, edit and experience photographs. Whereas a normal digital camera captures a snapshot of light hitting a sensor, a light field camera first separates rays of light in order to individually record their color, intensity and direction. This extra information opens up a world of possibilities, including the ability to focus on any depth of field within a taken photo, observe a 3D-type effect even without specs, and boost images taken in extremely low light. Although light field cameras have been around for some time, they haven't been commercially viable. Now though, Lytro has secured backing worth $50million to bring a "competitively priced" camera to market "later this year" -- we'll see if they can beat similar plenoptic technology from Adobe to market. Can't wait that long? Check out the interactive photo (click on Elvis to re-focus) after the break, plus a video that also shows off the 3D effect. Both are the definition of mind-blowing.

Edit: Price

Quote:

Lytro introduces world's first light field camera: f/2 lens, $399, ships early 2012

Link to explanation of the camera's tech:

http://www.lytro.com/science_inside

Camera Hands-On

http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/19/lytro....

Same here Ponzi.

Grew up just outside of Rochester. Actually, where Xerox had their big plant.
Left there in the early 70s, around the time the area peaked economically I guess.

I will always remember Kodak as the reason I left the area, as the dads of several friends of mine (and their whole families) moved to northern CO when EK opened a distribution center there. Word got back on life in CO, and it was "outta there" for me.

I've only been back three times in 40 yrs. Sister's wedding, 20th HS reunion, and a consulting project (for Kodak, of all things -- EK vs Fuji).

From Canandaigua: Means 'Chosen Spot' in the Seneca language I believe. I remember an exodus from Kodak to Corning (in PA) in the 90's when they had mass layoffs. Then Corning laid them off again :(

Edit: just dug out my old Kodak Retina and it was dusty but still has a roll of unused film in it...

It's too bad to see the Rochester area have its flagship company go through this mess. I guess the Rochester metro area will just have to rely on its hard work in establishing a competitive position on property taxes, income taxes, corporate taxes, laizze-faire approach to business regulation, etc. to make up the difference on all the coming layoffs and loss of living/tax base (i.e. the EK retirees being screwed) that's coming their way ;)

What a great Ticker, Karl. Makes me both proud of what our country used to create and sad that somewhere along the line we decided we didn't want to make innovative stuff like we used to.

So did you have any luck with those astro shots? I was hoping to see one of those pics.

Degaston, you have a wicked and perverse sense of humor. I'd love to see what Bob Lonsberry would do with that comment about Metro Rochester's "hard work."

Very nicely said Karl. It's pretty sad to see an iconic company such as Kodak die, but they missed so many opportunities and didn't change with the times, as you eloquently stated.

Recall from your Ticker on 9/30/2011 you said this:

Genesis wrote..

They just drew down their credit line - if you do that knowing you intend to (or might intend to) file for bankruptcy, that is active fraud and executives could easily get nailed for it.

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?single....

Yep

I caught the sarcasm instantly. New York's tax structure has destroyed most every former urban powerhouse except NYC.

Ponzi, yes NY's fabulous tax structure has indeed destroyed much of the state's economic power, but institutionalized corporate stupidity did at least as much damage in the EK case. A veritable parade of incompetent CEO's has misled the company in so many wrong directions, time after time for more than 20 years that it has at times seemed, to an outsider, that they were intentionally trying to destroy it. I heard an opinion on a local talk radio show today that the company might have been okay if the economy had picked up sooner. What rubbish! EK has been a dead company walking for years and no amount of economic recovery could have changed that.
From what I've heard, the company's plan to emerge from BK is to sell off assets and borrow massively at high interest rates and then magic will happen and the company will be well on their way to full recovery.
What could possibly go wrong?

Its a sad day when a company decides to rely on aging patents and not to embrace or truly compete in the market place with the evolving technology.

As film cameras were becoming obsolete, I always wondered why Kodak did not get fully into the HQ digital printer or HQ digital printer market. With all those years of photographic chemistry and resources at their disposal bankruptcy was truly something that did not need to occur.

Instead of film some companies created a digital back to retrofit the larger popular 35 mm SLR type cameras with a ccd where the film would be exposed. Unfortunately the earlier versions were poor due to the poor pixel count- you threw away 90% of the image and only got the small square in the center of the focus.

I'd love to have a 10+ megapixel back for some of my earlier analog SLRs due to their simplicity. The beauty of film was the detail that could be captured due to the small particles of the film. When ccds devices get to the nanometer scale or smaller for pixels that will truly be a day to behold for detail (and for picture size-lol).

Good article Karl. I like my 35mm Pentax 35mm SLR - both digital and analog due to the interchangeable parts.

While the death of Kodak is a sad moment, I look back fondly to my days in high school (OK, it wasn't all that long ago) and my Photography classes. Given all the technological advances since then, it seems like the mid 90's were ages ago. Our photography teacher was outstanding; cut his teeth as a combat photographer in Vietnam, ran his own photo studio for 20-something years before deciding to just run that on weekends and pass on his wealth of knowledge to snotty high school kids. He completely overhauled the photo studio and curriculum while there and turned it into something truly phenomenal, especially for a high school photo lab. Us all out buying Kodak T-Max 100 film and endless packages of photographic paper must have kept EK running for an extra 5 years! We shot our own rolls with Pentax K1000 cameras, developed our own film (handling all those chemicals...parents would have a fit today) then use the enlargers and expose our photographs, mount them, etc. Awesome course, awesome teacher. Such a shame that entire industry is now incredibly obsolete. I remember a local sales guy from Olympus came out and gave our class a pitch on their future line of DSLRs...they looked so futuristic and foreign to us at the time! No film? How does it work? Incredible times.

I also remember my parents taking us as little children to the Fotomat down the block to drop off our 110 film cartridges and Dad's 35mm film cans after our trips to Florida. 2 weeks later and Mom would sit us down to look at our slides. Crazy how things have changed. One thing I have noticed, we still have all those slides and 4 x 6 photographs, but all our digital photos "are on a CD somewhere" or "died with the lat PC" or are simply stored on Snapfish or Shutterfly. Nobody really goes back to look at our digital photos the way we used to go through the slides and photographs.

Film in motion pictures is still used all the Time. Two film producers Kodak and Fuji. They are different in their construction. I think someone or maybe Kodak will still have the ability to produce motion picture film. Kodak was working hard in the film area for motion picture film to compete against HD. They just came out with a new stock of 16mm that is unbelievable and will digitally convert to HD and be fantastic.

WHY NOT SHOOT HD you say.

Because of the things Karl mentioned in his post, contrast range, the FILM CURVE for latitude range and WHERE it is, which is very important for shooting outside. And at level of production for top quality motion pictures and commercials, film is the choice, and it really doesn't cost more than HD, that is a myth. At the level we are discussing. VIDEO VILLAGE is an expensive proposition, and HD engineers and monitors and cables and all the gear to control the light because of Digital lack of ability to handle high contrast with smooth latitude is a huge issue.

Kodak was film company and tried to stay a film company. Did they make mistakes of course. However they were competing against something they were going to lose. CHEAP over Quality. Mass over Individualism. Everyone is a film maker these days. HD in your cell phone. Its the same old story of Mass production for the sheep.

Buy the tool and you're as good as the other guy that has the same tool. Really, a hammer and a saw are about as simple as you can get. Some become carpenters, others not, yet they have the same simple tools.

Hype and people not truly understanding how both systems work and why one is still superior to the other. I meet people in the industry who never work(ed) with film. Yet they all say oh it will be someday soon. Huh Huh, and I have been hearing that for over 40 years, and it still has a long way to go. They shoot movies in HD now. WRong, they shoot SOME parts of movie in HD on SOME movies. On a soundstage with total light control, and most of the Time now its FN Blue Screen or Grreen Screen. Technical choices as to which and why.

Kodak went on a tour promoting their new film stocks a while back. They came to Memphis. The rep called and invited me, and asked me about why no one was RVSPing. The friggin "FILM" professors at the University of Memphis did not RSVP and she called them and asked the to come. ONE came. They aren't "FILM" guys anyway, most have documentary or news backgrounds if that and think HD is going to take the place of film because its CHEAPER. Not at the level they have never been to, or they wouldn't think that way.

Oh an if you want to preserve all those movies you better use film. Which formats and who is going to pay to transfer all this stuff as a new format comes along etc. Film is still used for a transfer from movies released on HD in theatres for future use.

Because all you need to see a piece of film is light and a lens. And a copy will last decades before it needs to be copied.

Well, nowadays, astrophotography is nowhere near the monumental effort that it took when we were young. Tonight I packed up the car for heading to a yellow zone site after work tomorrow to get out under the stars and do some photography. Todays power and tools make it a much easier experience when you consider that I can throw all of my gear including a duck blind and space heater with a nice equatorial mount, photography scope, guide scope, guide camera, my canon 60d, a 12" truss dob for my eyeballs while the mount is guiding and the camera is taking subs, and a laptop to control all of it into a toyota matrix and be set up in no time. Of course, nowadays its a 2 hour drive to get to a decent dark sky site.

Not to mention all of the power in the software that allows these amazing images to be taken - acquisition software which is cheap, planetarium, polar alignment, and mount control software, along with image stacking software which is all free, and nowadays you can get reasonably priced, extremely powerful image processing software inexpensively (compared to photoshop anyway).

I am by no means an expert and havent bagged an APOD yet but plenty of people do on rigs more modest than mine, and I didnt exactly spend a fortune on the equipment. I do buy very nice quality stuff and mostly buy it used where I get a significant discount.

The C14 will always more than likely be the planet killer of telescopes - some of the most amazing images I have seen of Jupiter, Saturn and Mars were all taken with C14s.

Just beware of the Digital Rebel line - lots of people have had problems (me included) with the power control boards dying just after the warranty expired and its a 250-300 dollar repair and 4-6 weeks at Canon. I threw my T1i away and upgraded to the 60d.

Eh, if the Rebel dies the body wasn't that expensive, and other than the kit lens that came with it all my others that I've bought are full-frame capable.

I grew up in a suburb in Rochester in the shadows of Kodak's smokestacks and both my father and brother worked at Kodak as "sheet metal mechanics." Their facilities in Rochester were no less than a small city - it was really that big and they even had their own zip codes, bus systems, power generating plants and water treatment plants. That company provided great middle class jobs, not only for the hundred's of thousands of their own workers at the time, but also for all of the ancillary businesses that grew up around them. So, it is truly sad to see this happen not only to them, but to our country and citizens as a whole.

Rochester was a great place to have kids and raise a family - thanks for the trip down memory lane...

Incidentally for those who are wondering, I have NONE (literally) of my slide racks any more (there's a long story behind how they were lost -- I wasn't always a middle-class or better guy and did have my share of rough times) but I thought most of my astrophotography -- which I had run two of virtually everything (including contact dupes off the Ektachrome slide film) was safe at the school where the 'scope was.

Wrong answer.

A few years ago I visited and asked to go through their slide library, expecting to show my kid not only my work, but that of many others, both students and teachers. Guess what -- all gone. Every one of them. Someone had, over the years, taken the entire collection and not just my work -- that of many others who I knew personally and who had their slides there. All they had left was stock and relatively-newly-shot digital.

I was stunned -- and more than a bit angry. Nobody currently there knew where any of it had gone.

You can argue over the "ease of loss of digital" all you want, but I can fit a lot more in a big fat disk drive than I ever could in a slide carousel, and it's a hell of a lot easier to make a second copy of the disk too.

At some point changing drives, I lost a bunch of images. Probably 5k or more of sunsets and other weather related stuff. Went looking for a picture a while back and the folders were there but empty.

That SUCKED.

Of course it doesn't suck any more than finding that stack of pictures you no longer have the negatives for got damp and glued themselves together.

True.

Karl,

This in my opinion might be the death of film. From a lighting aspect you can't do with video, what you can do with film. Though the producers have about killed the industry anyway. Greed and control now rule there as in the financial markets to the same level of stink.

Video, Still in Digital is fine for personal and business applications in many area's. Film when it goes will leave all markets. I don't think the Exteriors of Lord of the Rings could have been shot in digital. HD is limited by its range. If it rules by itself and film ceases in the next few years. Photography as an art will have lost a very valuable tool.

Labs will close, the lack of Kodak in the market might not let the still guys shooting large format BW and Color have no place to go because there customer base was chopped by a large percentage.

Small town movie theaters that couldn't afford digital projection were already being shut out because of digital only releases, didn't want to make a bunch of prints. Though they do have a print for storage purposes. At least currently most of the movies are shot with film and then digitally transferred for editing. Then a film version is edited for prints and storage.

This will most likely lead to an end to BW film stock in 16mm and 35mm feature and still. That will be a loss from a creative position.

However I did read about the new camera someone posted about above a few months ago. It did sound interesting and might have potential if it can handle latitude in the whites. Video is the winner in blacks. Video good for dark, lots of latitude in the blacks. Film good for bright light scenes and lots of latitude in white areas.

Video cameras are Tri chrome so to speak. They make a fake BW, nothing like Film, and nothing like the original BW cameras from the first TV shows.

This new camera I read about using light waves to capture images might not have the restrictions CMOS and others have.

What I think I do recall though is that the camera could be very small and great for hidden applications with great images.

Depends if current lenses can adapt to it or it will need lenses ground and shaped to its specifications. There are lens decades old around and still being used, Lot of expensive glass Panavision, Arri, Mitchell cameras too.

Gregg Toll
Antonio Storaro
Sven Nykvist
Conrad Hall
James Wong Howe
Christopher Doyle
and others shake their heads.

How will film survive now, economy will destroy whats left of the film base (pun not intended).


I recalled that the light camera also allows you to choose where the focus point is. This means loss of control for the DP who is lensing and lighting the film. Then color correction, the movie will be made by COMMITTEE or a single dictator. Not how great movies are made.

Hate to break it to you, but lord of the rings was all shot on digital cameras.

"Red" cameras, to be specific. The hobbit is being shot in 3d with "red epic" cameras.

Red camera: http://www.wired.com/entertainment/holly....

Google with many references to LOTR and red cameras: http://www.google.com/search?num=100....

Home page: http://www.red.com/

Wow, a LOT more stuff has been shot with red cameras than I would have thought, including some real surprises, like book of eli, angels and demons, district 9 and skyline.

http://www.red.com/experience

Now that imaging has been digitized Moore's Law affects photography too. There was a time in which digital photographs had a lower dynamic range than film but that problem is being solved and improvements are already showing up in consumer devices. After a few more product cycles HDR will be common even in the cheap cameras while further improvements keep coming down the pipeline.

The interesting thing is that my little Canon T3i, with Magic Lantern, has NEARLY the range of the "Red" cameras. If you load that on one of Canon's full-frame-sensor cameras you wind up with an imaging device with MORE depth (resolution x dynamic range) than those allegedly "SOTA" digital cinema devices!

Nonetheless, there's still a dynamic range problem and if you know what you're looking for you'll see it. I see it in the theaters all the time, and spot it instantly in prints made from digital sources.

But I know what I'm looking for because I was one of those guys who would hand-dodge-and-burn color and B&W prints while doing the enlargements by hand to coax out a bit of dynamic range that was in the slide or negative but was going to be lost in a straight-up enlargement.

Most people don't have a damned clue what I just said or what I'm talking about when it comes to dynamic range. It's not just contrast range, although that's a big part of it.

Film is dying. It's dying for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it has a latency between shoot and look that isn't there with digital. On my Minolta 7000i I'd often set (via a custom function) three-exposure bracketing for anything I really cared about so I'd actually take three images with one button press. The reason was that your metering might be off and this way you had a decent shot at getting the exposure nailed, and thus get that bit of dynamic range where you would otherwise miss it. With digital though I don't need to do that -- I can shoot, look at the result and digital histogram both for amplitude and chroma and if it's "off" immediately re-shoot the scene with the correction and know which way I have to go. It's the immediacy of that sort of feedback process that has made digital so enticing across the board.

But is that "progress"? I don't know. In exchange for immediacy I give up dynamic range, and while this means I can get "centered" more frequently on the digital media I give up the edges on both ends to get that immediate feedback -- when you nail it with film you simply do get more.

I like my T3i and like I said, it's close to film.

But it's not film.

I'd be curious to see what kind of stuff could be done with a video Lytro cam, though we'll need memory and buses capable of pushing ~600MB/s to achieve that.. Their 8GB cam is advertised to store 350 pix, so that puts each pic at ~23MB, and 24 of those per second.. OTOH, you would end up with 3D footage and could have every element on screen be in focus simultaneously (which would actually likely be quite jarring).. I also wonder if the light field file format is amenable to modification/CGI in 3D vector space..