Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Buckle up film shooters because things are about to get a whole lot more expensive. Or at least, they will if you insist on using Kodak film. And you live in Japan. According to National Photo in Japan, both 35mm and 120 films will see a price increase by as much as 40% in some instances.
The price increase is set for January 16th, and as Digital Camera World puts it, even though the increases are happening in Japan, it’s highly likely they will roll out similarly in the rest of the world.
There is no doubt that Kodak has brought a revolution into the world of photography. So, the American Chemical Society (ACS) has proclaimed Eastman Kodak the National Historic Chemical Landmark. This title honors George Eastman and Kodak, and their role in making photography available to everyone.
We’re back in the Kodak factory in Rochester, New York today with Destin from Smarter Every Day. It’s the second part of a three-part series looking into exactly how Kodak makes its film stock for photographers. In part one, we saw a general overview of the mechanical processes involved in making the blank film base and in part two we find out how they actually make it light sensitive.
As with the first video, part two is almost an hour long and goes into a lot of depth into not only how the process is done but why certain choices are made during manufacture, depending on the needs of the final product.
Kodak recently made film photographers happy by announcing the Kodak Professional Gold 200 in 120mm format. And if you’ve ever wondered how they make it, Destin Sandlin of SmarterEveryDay will make you even happier. He recently visited the Kodak plant in Rochester, New York, and in his latest video, he’s taking you on a tour around the factory.
Film shooters rejoice, Kodak has some good news for you. Kodak Moments (the division of Kodak Alaris) has resurrected Kodak Professional Gold 200 in 120mm. If you’re looking into upgrading to medium format, this will be a great place to start. But also, it’s great if you’re looking to cut back on the film cost as it will be a more affordable option than other 120mm color film rolls from Kodak.
Film’s popularity has been on the rise for a few years now, gaining more and more ground each day. And as Destin Sandlin at Smarter Every Day points out at the beginning of this video, it’s not just us photo geeks that are getting back into it, either. I wouldn’t say it’s becoming “mainstream” again, but it’s regular normal everyday people who are experimenting with film again now.
The 56-minute video is the first of a three-part series in which Dustin takes us on a tour of the Kodak Factory in Rochester, New York where they still have production lines making new rolls of film to keep the growing market happy. Kodak isn’t the only manufacturer of film that’s still around today, but they’re one of the oldest and most legendary.
Kodak has announced Kodak Reelz, their new film digitiser. It allows you to capture 8mm and Super 8 film straight to 1080p high definition video with the push of a button. It accepts 3″, 5″ and 7″ rolls of film onto a universal reel and on-screen directions allow you to capture it in 1080p resolution using the mp4 codec straight to an SD card up to 128GB in capacity.
No computer or software is needed, as everything is done internally in Reelz itself. It has a large 5″ display on the front for navigation and to let you watch movies while they’re being captured as well as play your previous recordings back to you. Interestingly, despite only capturing 1080p footage, they say it offers frame-by-frame digitizing with an 8.08-megapixel sensor, suggesting that it might offer some 4K abilities in a future firmware update.
The holiday season is rapidly approaching and it will soon be time to start that desperate search for gifts. For those of you with millennials in your life, you might want to check out this little handheld bundle of nostalgia. The Kodak Memory is a tiny greyscale printer made to look like an old 35mm film roll. In fact, the photos come out of it in such a way that they emulate the look of the film exiting the roll. Cute!
Rumours of a collaboration between Oppo and Kodak on a smart phone have been batted around for a while now. It’s not exactly a new concept, with many phone manufacturers teaming up with big camera names: Huawei and Leica, OnePlus and Hasselblad, Vivo and Zeiss to name but a few. Now it looks as though Oppo and Kodak have finally joined the camera-phone club, but is it exactly a new product or is it a rehash of an existing one?
An Instagram post from Kodak recently infuriated Chinese people. In fact, it caused so much backlash that Kodak deleted the post and issued a public apology. The company shared a photo by French documentary photographer Patrick Wack, showing the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. They linked the photographer’s account which mentions the mass detentions of the Uyghur people in the area, which caused a fierce backlash.
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