Personal ramblings on photography
DPReview: Kodak photo businesses sold to private equity
Well….
This is not good news. Private equity are the corporate looters. And this one is the one that removed “Co-op” from “Mountain Equipment Co-op”…
I don’t expect Kodak film product to be developing. Maybe it’s time to stock up. And when some Fujifilm are suspected to just be Kodak, I wonder about the broader impact.
The Tyee reminds us of When Fred Herzog Saw in Black and White.
Celebrated as a master of colour, the Vancouver photographer had a different side, now on display.
Now a new book show the work he was less known for: black and white. Work published posthumously as Fred Herzog passed away in 2019. This last article shows you a good sample of his colour work, and also relate of the difficulty of shooting in colour.
I discovered Fred Herzog through one of his books at a barber shop in Vancouver when I lived there. What fascinated me was the colour photography of Vancouver, from a time where black & white was the dominant form of photography, mostly due to technology and cost. Pictures of an ever changing city, where heavy transformations make large parts of a city disappear, to be replaced. It showed us the city as it was, and the colour offered us a more realistic feel.
It inspired me.
When I wasn’t looking, 2 different model of film cameras where released under the Kodak brand. Just to be clear these are inexpensive and marginally better than the disposable counterparts, and Kodak is just a brand on top of it. This is not the Ricoh Pentax 17 at CA$680.
From 2022, the Kodak Ektar H35 Half Frame Camera is manufactured by Retopro. It’s 35mm film half-frame camera, with a 22mm acrylic lens, f/9.5 fixed aperture, and 1/100 sec fixed speed and a flash. The frame is vertical in the natural camera orientation as the film transport is horizontal. About CA$80. Comes in various colours in a design reminiscent of older Kodak camera.
In 2023, a follow up Kodak Ektar H35N still made by Retopro, brought the lens to a fixed f/8 aperture with one of the element made of glass, and now has a bulb shutter speed and a tripod mount, and can perform multiple exposures. Still has a flash. About CA$100. Comes in various colours with a slightly different design.
From 2024, the Kodak i60, manufactured by Meta Imaging Solutions is a 35mm film camera with a 31mm acrylic lens, f/10 fixed aperture with a minimum focusing distance of 1 meter and 1/125 sec fixed speed, and a flash. Really feels like a disposable camera you can refill. About CA$80 as well. Comes in various colours in design directly inspired by the Instamatic 100 from 1963. Reading Kodak own website saying it uses “135mm film”, I want to scream. Beside the design it looks like all the others on Kodak website.
All in all it seems like competition to Lomography, both in quality and and price, albeit with maybe Lomography trying to provide more “fun”.
PetaPixel inform that Fujifilm Set to Restart Colour Film Production in China:
Fujifilm reportedly held a colour film launch event in China where it announced it would restart the production of its C200 and C400 colour negative film through production partner Yes!Star.
C200 and C400 are the successor of the Superia line of films: consumer grade (but high quality) colour negative film. With film prices rising, and choice reducing, it seems like good news.
More supplies is better. With Ricoh releasing a new film camera, it seems that film is not dead.
I previously mentioned the Pentax film renaissance. Today Pentax announced the Pentax 17 (via DPReview).
This gives the details we didn’t previously have.
It’s a vertical half frame (17 mm wide, 24 mm tall) 35mm millimeter compact camera, with a manual focus fixed prime lens. It has program exposure with a few modes, and built-in flash with sync at 1/125. It will be priced at US$499.95, to be available in late (aren’t we already in the second half?) June 2024.
The manual focusing is zone based, reminiscent of non auto-focus compact cameras, and the viewfinder is parallax corrected, and centered on the lens in the middle of the camera. This is neither a reflex (through the lens) nor a rangefinder.
The body construction has metal, i.e. it’s not a cheap plastic blob. The leaf shutter goes from 4 sec to 1/350 sec, with also a bulb mode. The lens is a fixed 25mm (37mm equivalent) with f/3.5 aperture closed down to a max of f/16. Film advance is mechanic with a lever, so is ISO setting (no DX). The camera uses a CR2 battery for the metering and the flash.
The half frame allow 48 and 72 shots on 24 and 36 exp rolls respectively. If you want to shoot in landscape mode, just flip the camera.
This camera could totally be from the late 1970s, minus a couple of things. According to Ricoh-Pentax, the lens is based on the 1994 Pentax Espio Mini, but using the same attribute as was used on the 1962 RICOH Auto Half
At US$500 I am not sure whether this is right-priced or not.
I have put up a curated list of Canada camera stores and film processing labs. This came from the need to know where I could get film processed, or get supplies for it.
There is a lot of reasons why you’d want to buy from a Canadian store (when living in Canada), including that some of the supplies, like chemicals for film processing, are not easy to import. Also the prices are mostly MSRP which mean that patronising a local business won’t cost you more.
I hope this is useful.
DPReview has an interview with the team behind Pentax upcoming film camera:
Everything analog is suddenly cool again, and photography is no exception: There’s an incredible renaissance happening in film photography, led by a generation who grew up never knowing anything other than digital cameras.
Yes. There is room for a few new film cameras that produce quality images (that’s a stab at Lomography). While things are moving in the world of film supplies, not always to the taste of aficionados, the stock of used film camera is just getting older. And older mean breakage, difficult to repair.
The first announcement came in December 2022, but in April 2024, the publication date of the interview, we have a bit more detail. It will be a half frame 35mm camera, vertical, in a compact format. But every other details remain elusive, including exposure modes.
To be continued…
Beau Photo tells us Hasselblad “The Holy Grail” XPan – Is it worth it?:
I’ve shot with the XPan numerous times, and each time I would put my clown mask on and tell myself that this camera will be mine someday. After a year of using this camera, I believe the XPan is worth it.
I remember more than 20 years ago hearing about the Hasselblad XPan, or its Japanese original, the Fujifilm TX-1 (the Hasselblad is actually just a rebadged Fujifilm). It was expensive, its lenses were expensive.
But what is it? It is a rangefinder film camera that could shoot in panoramic format, 24x65mm on a 35mm film (135) as well as the standard 24x36mm. It was pretty much the only option for panoramic photography without using a rotating lens like the Horizon or Widelux cameras, or without getting an expensive Mamiya 7 with the adapter to use 135 film instead of the 6×7 120 film frames.
I remember reading an article where the photographer used the XPan to cover a bicycle race. And vertically framed pictures showed us how unique this camera could be.
Too bad it is even more expensive now.
Kelly-Shane on the Go Everywhere channel made a 7 minutes video to show us how develop black & white slide film, only using regular black and white film, black and white chemistry, and some household chemicals to perform the reversal process.
I am actually surprised it is that easy. I always wanted to try black and white slides but the availability of Agfa Scala always made it a hard sell.
This is not the first time Polaroid Spectra film becomes discontinued. The first time was when Polaroid went under and the remaining stock depleted. DPReview now reports that Polaroid Originals is stopping the production of Spectra film because the remaining cameras are now aging, unrepairable, and there is nothing they can do about it.
This is a bigger problem with film photography in general that I wrote about previously: the whole production supply chain, from cameras to film processors and scanners is in danger. Nobody develops new hardware, because it requires a lot of R&D and the old one is becoming harder and harder to repair, non withstanding for processors and scanner where the software is antique and only runs on obsolete systems.