Not a pretty picture . . .
Do you know that there was a time when every roll of color film in America went to one lab to be processed? When you bought a roll of Kodak color film, it came with a bright yellow cloth bag attached. After you shot the film, you put it into the bag and it was pre-addressed to Kodak in Rochester, NY. After a week or more, you got your photographs in the mail with another yellow bag to use on the next roll.
These are hard times for Kodak which is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. They have been notified by the Securities and Exchange Commission that they have 30 days to raise the price of their stock or they will be de-listed which means that they could not be publicly traded any longer. The current price is Kodak stock is sixty-five cents. That’s right . . . sixty-five cents buys you one share of what was the greatest film and optics company on the planet.
Some years ago, Kodak held a press conference to ask for government protection against Fuji Film, which Kodak said had heavy financial support from the Japanese government and posed a threat to Kodak sales both in this country and overseas.
Some reporter at the press conference noted that there were eight photographers covering the event. He took it upon himself to ask each one individually what kind of film they were using. After all, these guys were only going to use the best.
The result was hardly surprising; all eight were shooting Fuji. They had all been Kodak users at one point but just moved on to Fuji because of brighter colors, sharpest contrast and other quality issues.
There was a time when the Kodak Instamatic was the camera to have. Millions of memories are archived away in closets and dresser drawers.
But no more. Kodak was overwhelmed in the avalanche of digital technology and just never caught up. They closed the film division and tried other aspects of visual media but it was way too late.
But the yellow bags . . . it’s an amazing thought to recall that every roll of color film in the entire United States was mailed to one lab to be processed.
Time moves forward . . . and the picture is not pretty . . .
Sorry if I’m a little dense, but I have to ask why the picture is not pretty. I’d much rather take pictures with a digital camera, sort them out on my computer, and email only the best ones to a photo service for printing. It’s cheaper and saves on materials such as ink and photo paper. But I’d imagine the blog author, a photographer, has insights that I am lacking, and I’m very interested to learn more about why this post comes to the conclusion it does. Thanks!
The sad part is that like the recording industry, Kodak resisted changing with the times. It easily could have led the way into the digital era seeing as how Steven Sasson, working as an engineer at Eastman Kodak, invented and built the first digital camera using a charge-coupled device image sensor in 1975.
They resisted change.