Kodak: An Affectionate Reminiscence And Eulogy – The ‘Book Mystique
I’m finding it very sad, A big sense of loss, really, to hear that Kodak has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Of course, it wasn’t a big surprise. Kodak has been one the bubble, so to speak, for the better part of the last decade, posting just one profitable year since 2004, and having shrunk to a mere shadow of its former towering corporate self.
From a peak of 145,300 employees in 1988, Kodak has radically downsized its global payroll to 18,800, and at its home base facility in upstate Rochester, New York to 7,100 from 60,400 workers there in 1982.
Ironically, Kodak fell victim to a technology attributed to one of its own engineers, Steven Sasson, who is credited with creating the first digital camera back in 1975. Film imaging had been Kodak’s lifeblood since its founding back in 1880 by George Eastman, who brought photography to the masses in 1900 with the Brownie Camera which sold for the princely sum of a single dollar (although dollars were a lot bigger back then).
It is said, likely only a slight exaggeration, that there wasn’t a household in America through the latter part of the 20th Century in which a Kodak product could not be found. My own first photographic adventures involved one of the Kodak Instamatic 126s that my sister and I got for Christmas back in the early ’60s. If you’re of a certain age, perhaps you remember Kodak’s “open me first” Christmas advertising campaigns. The little Instamatic with its plastic single-element lens and compromised 126 cartridge format that had film plane flatness issues and a square picture format, wasn’t much of a camera, but it got me started, and those little Instamatics recorded a lot of memories. However, it’s now conceivable, indeed probable, that the current generation could be the first in a hundred years or so that may grow up without ever using a Kodak product. Which makes Kodak’s nascent demise, if not completely disappearing as a corporate entity, at least as a ubiquitous element of the domestic landscape, a cultural watershed.
Collosus Of Rochester
Kodak certainly seemed an indomitable colossus astride the southern shores of Lake Ontario when my wife and I made a pilgrimage from our home in Nova Scotia to Rochester in the early fall of 1976. At the time, I was making part of my living as a wedding and portrait photographer, and photography was my main hobby as well, so checking out the mothership, so to speak, on the return leg of a trip to Toronto to visit relatives, seemed logical.
We were traveling in our ’67 MGB sports car, and driving top down through the grape-growing district of upstate New York, the soft September sunshine’s warmth making the air redolent of ripe grapes, was more than a little idyllic. Indeed, we couldn’t resist stopping at a U-Pick and self-harvesting a large basket of fruit that we somehow stuffed into the MG’s packed-out cockpit, and which made our stay in a Rochester motel that evening memorable for more than the fact that it was located just down the street from Kodak headquarters.
The next morning we headed off to Kodak to sign up for the factory tour, professionally organized with dedicated guides and involving a shuttle bus to ferry us between stops around the massive facility. I recall that the Kodak folks were particularly proud of what was apparently their recently-implemented recycling program for plastics from the likes of Instamatic drop-in film cartridges and 35MM film canisters.
Later in the day, we made our way to George Eastman House, the erstwhile mansion of Kodak’s founder, where he tragically took his own life in 1932 after a long battle with major illness. Now a museum, the edifice and its surrounding gardens were impressive, although the house didn’t feel terribly homey, what with its large atriums, marble floors, and vast expanse of windows that must have made the place a nightmare to heat in winter.
An irony here is that these shots I took that day are on Agfachrome and not Kodak film, an early precursor of what would inevitably befall Kodak in its fall from dominance of the photographic film market. I was on a tight budget, and the Agfa film was significantly cheaper than Kodachrome, as well as providing very acceptable results, along with decent archival properties, as the shots you see here, scanned from the 37 year old slides last weekend, attest.
Kodachrome
That said, Kodachrome was then, and remains for all time, my photographic film of choice for occasions when image quality was of paramount importance. If you had a film camera in the ’70s, ’80s, or ’90s, and took transparencies, you probably know what I mean, and there’s a pretty strong likelihood that you have some Kodachrome transparencies tucked away in your snapshot archive shoebox. The year we made our Rochester sojourn, Kodak reportedly owned 90 percent of film sales and 85 percent of camera sales in the U.S., and while the German-made Agfa, and Italy’s Ferraniachrome, which I also experimented with, never managed to make more than small dent in Kodak’s sales hegemony, a new and more formidable challenger from the Orient, Fuji Film, was making its debut. It wasn’t as good as Kodachrome, but Fujichrome was a more than competitive challenger to Kodak’s other transparency film family, Ektachrome, and Fuji’s mass-market negative films were every bit as good as Kodak’s, and cheaper. Fuji also out-marketed complacent Kodak, landing designation as the official film of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic games after complacent Kodak turned the sponsorship offer down, a move that fixed Fuji in consumer consciousness as a viable alternative to Kodak.
But Kodachrome remained top dog, quality-wise. Even if film photography predates you, if you’ve ever perused National Geographic or other magazines with high-quality colour photos, you’re familiar with Kodachrome images, which were further immortalized in Paul Simon’s eponymous musical homage to the product in a hit 1973 tune.
Kodachrome’s rich, deeply saturated colors, long latitude (detail in shadows with a dynamic range of roughly 8 f-stops), and fine-grained image clarity had a way of making shots look better than real life, in a good and believable way. However, the last roll of Kodachrome was produced in 2009, and it’s part of history now.
Digital Kodachrome?
Incidentally, you can experience a somewhat Kodachrome-like color rendering digitally using HDR photo enhancement software. By combining multiple bracketed exposures of the same shot, preferably taken with a tripod ensuring constant camera position, HDR software can combine data from the entire range of available brightness and color in your multiple exposures, giving your final image brilliant highlights and detail in the shadows. If you want experiment, HDR software is available at prices ranging from free to moderately-priced. http://www.ohanaware.com Ohanaware’s HDRtist is freeware, and probably the easiest-to-use HDR software program for the Mac.
http://www.ohanaware.com/hdrtistpro/HDRtist Pro is next step up from basic HDRtist, featuring far more control and options, a different interface, ability to save your HDRs (for editing later), a 128-bit floating point engine and tone mapping system, two generators: HDR and Exposure Blending, the ability to save directly into iPhoto/Aperture, add special effects, watermarks, frames and captions to your HDR Photos, and to print and share your HDR Photos online. HDRtist Pro can also create HDR-like effects using a single photograph, thereby rendering what is referred to as pseudo HDR or faux HDR, and also merge and align multiple shots of the same image taken handheld without a tripod before HDR processing.
You can find my full ‘Book Mystique Review of HDRtist Pro here:
http://bit.ly/iSJbt3
Back to Kodak, in the end it wasn’t competition from rival film manufacturers that proved the company’s undoing, but it’s own in-house invention, the digital camera. Kodak did embrace digital imaging technology, and was an early leader in bringing consumer level digital cameras to market. By 2001 it was the number two digital camera vendor in the U.S. behind Sony in sales, although it subsequently faded to fourth place. Kodak digitals have been pretty good products too. I bought an EasyShare C300 for my daughter, and it performed well, but when it was stolen, she replaced it with an snazzier Olympus. Kodak never came close to dominating digital photography the way it had film imaging for more than a century. Then came the cellphone camera revolution, which has really taken the wind out of point-and-shoot digital camera sales, and is a sector in which Kodak has no presence.
One deduces that Kodak’s top brass never fully grasped the paradigm-shift that digital photography represented, both in terms of economy for the user (at least if they already owned a computer), but also instantly available results and facility of software-based image optimization, correction, and tweaking, without need of a darkroom and the skill to use one. Those aspects have been huge, but it seemed that Kodak was unwilling or unable to accept that the curtain was dropping on the film photography era until it was too late.
Kodak And Apple
By the way, Kodak had various alliances and collaborations with Apple over the last 30 years. For. Example, the Apple QuickTake 100 digital camera of 1994 that sold for a suck-in-your-breath $749. The QuickTake 100 leveraged licensed Kodak technology, had Kodak internals, and was actually manufactured by Kodak. Apple also farmed out its notebook warranty and repair service to Kodak for a time. However, like so many companies that have had business partnerships or collaborations with Apple, Kodak became at best an Apple frenemy, and most recently not even that.
Kodak recently sued Apple for alleged patent infringement, Apple responding by petitioning the US Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York to prevent Kodak from using certain disputed patents as collateral to obtain loans, contending that those Kodak patents actually belong to Apple. The petition filing says Kodak is seeking authority to “enter into a $950 million postpetition financing facility secured by security interests in and liens upon substantially all of Kodak’s assets, including certain patents that are subject to ongoing patent ownership and patent infringement disputes between Kodak and Apple,” and that the disputed intellectual property involves “pioneering work on digital camera and imaging technology and related hardware, software, and user and communication interfaces” dating back to the early 1990s, when Apple partnered with Kodak “to explore how the two companies could work together on various projects including commercialization of Apple’s digital cameras.”
So ends the Kodak era of photography, more with a whimper than a bang. I do hope that the company can find a way to survive as a maker of printers and whatnot, but the days when photographs started in red-on-yellow film boxes are gone, and that marks a major cultural watershed, as well as what was widely regarded and one of America’s (and the world’s) more benevolent and enlightened corporate titans of the last century. For example, Kodak early on and voluntarily embraced profit-sharing with its employees, among the reasons it was never unionized.
Kodak’s downfall has been compared to the contemporaneous bankruptcy of General Motors in 2009, but it’s a faulty analogy. Kodak’s problems predated the 2008 recession, and were more due to a technological seismic shift than the general economic downturn.
GM has staged an astonishingly rapid recovery, and restoration of its status as the world’s best-selling automaker. People still need and want cars and trucks. They, except for specialist pros and a handful of advanced hobbyists, do not need or want photographic film. And while digital photo technology is in many ways inferior to film technology, analogical to the saw-off between vinyl and digital is the audio world, it’s plenty good enough to satisfy most of us. Too bad Kodak didn’t understand that sooner.