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Andre Noble
13-Nov-2009, 10:46
Hello,

Ilfochrome, Polaroid, and Kodachrome have either been discontinued or are on the blink.

What do you feel, of the remaining traditional photography media is most precious, meaning you enjoy it, you appreciate it, but are concerned that it may go the way of the above named materials?

MIke Sherck
13-Nov-2009, 11:25
Film -- but I'm not anxious over it. They'll still be making it after I'm gone, and I come from long-lived stock! :)

csant
13-Nov-2009, 11:32
Is Ilfochrome on the way of being discontinued?

Emmanuel BIGLER
13-Nov-2009, 11:37
The most "precious" ? Platinum prints, of course @ $40,000 per kilo of platinum ;)
... and second to platinum, palladium, a bargain : only $10,000 per kilo :D

Heroique
13-Nov-2009, 11:42
This would make for a fun poll – listing, say, 10 items of potential “concern.”

Personally, I’d mourn the loss of either TMax-100 or TMax RS, a favorite combination.

(I've recovered from my grief over Type 55, and with faith, await its resurrection.)

Drew Wiley
13-Nov-2009, 11:42
Ilfochrome might not be imported in the same quantities as before, and you might have
to order it in advance, but it's still a viable commercial as well as personal printing option. The mfg in Switzerland is well funded. A lot of labs got out of it not only due to
the expense, but due to the corrosive nature of the chemistry, which requires special
handling and disposal. Easy to control in small batch use, however. I still print it.

jb7
13-Nov-2009, 12:01
Personally, my very finite stock of T55...

Andre Noble
13-Nov-2009, 12:05
I assumed Ilfochrome is gone. Hadn't done my homework.

Jason Greenberg Motamedi
13-Nov-2009, 12:21
My largest current concern is the growing difficulty in affording and finding "bulk" chemicals. As governmental regulation of both transportation and sale of chemicals increases I am finding it more difficult to buy the chemicals I need.

Brian Ellis
13-Nov-2009, 13:54
Slide film. I don't know why it's still around but it surely won't be for much longer. It was a very small percentage of the color film market even before digital and now that things formerly submitted on slide film by pros to clients, magazines, etc. are submitted as digital images (so I'm told), I don't know who buys it in enough quantity to sustain a viable market. However, I thought it would disappear long before now and it hasn't so I'm probably wrong about its future too.

Gene McCluney
13-Nov-2009, 14:17
Slide film. I don't know why it's still around but it surely won't be for much longer. It was a very small percentage of the color film market even before digital and now that things formerly submitted on slide film by pros to clients, magazines, etc. are submitted as digital images (so I'm told), I don't know who buys it in enough quantity to sustain a viable market. However, I thought it would disappear long before now and it hasn't so I'm probably wrong about its future too.

Well, I still use about a hundred sheets of 4x5 a month in transparency film. I realize this is not enough to sustain a manufacturer but surely there are still other professional commercial photographers that do products and arcitecture on 4x5 transparency stock.
I have used the same film now for 30 years. Kodak EPP.

Scott Davis
13-Nov-2009, 14:21
I'll agree with Jason. The access to raw chemicals is becoming more difficult and expensive by the month, making the fall-backs from/alternatives to film that otherwise can easily be done at home prohibitive in effort and cost.

Sevo
16-Nov-2009, 07:13
Slide film. I don't know why it's still around ...

It scans better. There is no widely standardised calibration regime like IT8 which applies to colour negative.

Gary L. Quay
16-Nov-2009, 07:16
I think slide film will be around as long as movie film is. When studios go to digital capture for movies, slides will be doomed.

I've had no trouble getting raw chemicals. Digitaltruth and Photographers Formulary are always well stocked as far as I know.

The most prescious thing is silver nitrate. As long as we have that, we can make phoots.

--Gary

Sevo
16-Nov-2009, 07:37
I think slide film will be around as long as movie film is. When studios go to digital capture for movies, slides will be doomed.


Why should it? Cine film stock is and always has been (colour) negative. Only TV news, some industrial/technical applications and amateurs ever shot reversal - and all volume relevant parts of these went video more than twenty years ago.

John Kasaian
16-Nov-2009, 07:44
Babies, puppies, kittens and piglets are precious, but photographic materials?

From a cost perspective, the use of silver, platinum, and gold likely deserve a mention but that probably isn't the answer you're looking for.

If pressed, I'd have to say vision, emotion, and intellect are the three most precious ingredients it takes to make a photograph. :)

BetterSense
16-Nov-2009, 10:32
Kodachrome?

Renato Tonelli
16-Nov-2009, 11:13
I think B&W negative will be around for a long time to come; my main film is Tri-X.

I would upset by the loss of transparency film even though I use only 50+ sheets a year and I can't seem to find it in 5x7 (my next format:D ).

Polaroid was a big loss for both the 55 p/n and the color that I was using for transfers and lifts - still hoarding some.

rdenney
16-Nov-2009, 11:19
It scans better. There is no widely standardised calibration regime like IT8 which applies to colour negative.

It surely scans more easily, if the objective is color accuracy to the original film. And those color targets are the reason.

But for art photographers who experience a high ratio of time/image, negatives are better for scanning. They stuff a wider range of scenery values into a narrower range of densities, and thus more easily fit within the range of scanners (especially affordable scanners).

My Nikon film scanner does quite well with Velvia, but Velvia doesn't always do that well with the scene at hand. I don't think the Epson flatbed is going to do as well with transparencies.

But with negatives, the photographer will be working through the color balance for each image or batch of images to achieve a pleasing look. They won't have a transparency original to use as a reference. For many, that will be no serious limitation. For those who shoot for magazines, especially if others do their scanning, it will.

Rick "always getting back to those requirements" Denney

Mark Stahlke
16-Nov-2009, 12:27
"Most Precious Traditional Photography Media Remaining?"

Time. There is nothing more precious than that.

Gary L. Quay
17-Nov-2009, 02:25
Why should it? Cine film stock is and always has been (colour) negative. Only TV news, some industrial/technical applications and amateurs ever shot reversal - and all volume relevant parts of these went video more than twenty years ago.

So, movies are shot on negative film and reversed?

--Gary

Sevo
17-Nov-2009, 02:48
So, movies are shot on negative film and reversed?


Absolutely.

Sevo

Robert A. Zeichner
17-Nov-2009, 05:19
So, movies are shot on negative film and reversed?

--Gary

They are reversed by scanning into a file format. The editing is done digitally and more and more, the release is electronic as well with the tremendous growth of digital cinema projection. I have to believe the demand for release print stock has diminished tremendously. I also have to believe that release print stock was one of the single highest volume film products Kodak produced.

Sascha Welter
17-Nov-2009, 06:39
I also have to believe that release print stock was one of the single highest volume film products Kodak produced.

In the 90s when I was studying photography with Jost J. Marchesi we were told that the highest volume film products were aerial surveillance films. The explanation given was that they had a very wide format (4 or 5 inches?) and were shooting quite rapidly along, with the "photographer" not having to shoulder the bill himself. This has changed for sure (the use of film for aerial photography, not who's got to pay or not).

Sevo
17-Nov-2009, 07:22
I have to believe the demand for release print stock has diminished tremendously.

Not yet. In the US, a small majority of theaters seem to have converted to digital - but even there, conversion to HD beamers is mostly happening in the small to medium venues, as quality digital projection for big to gigantic theatres (whose count determines the number of copies, as they show new releases simultaneously while the small and provincial ones get old, used copies as available, weeks or months after the start) still is not cost efficient. In Europe digital projection still is in a minority role in any case.

Sevo

BetterSense
17-Nov-2009, 07:46
The vast majority of theaters are still film-projection. I'm not quite convinced of the absolute practicality of digital projection, even considering the enormous cost and logistics advantages it would bring. In the near future it could only happen with a considerable loss of picture quality, which is how all the digital technologies get started afterall.

But I have to wonder, with HD home theaters becoming more and more normal, does the movie industry really want to switch over to digital projection? What, then, do they really offer over the home-theater? It seems to me that film is still a selling point, but I expect the movie studios to fail to realize this and shoot themselves in the foot over it.

Marko
17-Nov-2009, 09:44
I don't know where you guys are getting your data, but here's a simple breakdown of standards, technologies and timelines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_cinema).

For those not interested in reading through all of this, here's the most interesting quote:


In March 2009 AMC Theatres announced that it closed on a $315 million deal with Sony to replace all of its movie projectors with 4k digital projectors starting in the second quarter of 2009 and completing in 2012.

(FYI, AMC Theaters is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) theatre venues in the U.S.)

<edit>
Funny that, now that I'm reading the dates - looks like 2012 might really be the end of the world for some here... :D
</edit>

cjbroadbent
17-Nov-2009, 10:50
Absolutely.
Sevo Maybe not. From the original negative, a postitive is printed by contact. From that positive, a number of (inter)negatives are made which, together with the optical sound track negatives, serve to make the release prints.

Sevo
17-Nov-2009, 11:24
Maybe not. From the original negative, a postitive is printed by contact. From that positive, a number of (inter)negatives are made which, together with the optical sound track negatives, serve to make the release prints.

It is even more complex, but it still does not stop being a negative-positive process, even though there are several branch copies and copying stages involved.

Bravin Neff
23-Nov-2009, 22:25
My understanding is that once movie releases to theaters are no longer manufactured to film, the economies of scale that sustain film production will pretty much be gone.

Robert Hughes
24-Nov-2009, 09:49
My understanding is that once movie releases to theaters are no longer manufactured to film, the economies of scale that sustain film production will pretty much be gone.
Which may happen in the USA fairly soon. But all those Bollywood films will continue to make 35mm prints forever, because you can throw any old projector in the back of a tuk-tuk and be a traveling movie house - those guys aren't going to buy $20,000 electronic projectors to replace the gear that works just fine right now.

Bravin Neff
24-Nov-2009, 19:01
Which may happen in the USA fairly soon. But all those Bollywood films will continue to make 35mm prints forever, because you can throw any old projector in the back of a tuk-tuk and be a traveling movie house - those guys aren't going to buy $20,000 electronic projectors to replace the gear that works just fine right now.

What happens when the $20,000 electronic projectors become $1,000 (or less) projectors? Economies of scale will cause that as well.

Then the tuk-tuk movie houses will have to ask themselves what they care about more: the costs of film media and transport/shipping costs of all that bulk media vs. the nearly weightless, nearly instantaneous delivery of digital media that doesn't require attendants to matchup-up the 11-minute reels?

The better question will be: what will the tuk-tuk movie house do when his competition becomes more efficient via digital projection, putting him at a disadvantage? He'll buy a digital projector, that's what he'll do.

Economics will work in India just as well as they do elsewhere. It might not happen at the same time, but the same phenomena will present itself.

John Bowen
25-Nov-2009, 05:39
OK, so we now return to the original question.....

Tmax 400 Film
Lodima Paper
The Chemistry necessary to mix Pyrocat HD and Amidol developers
Incandescent light bulbs to expose the Azo/Lodima paper

I've been thinking about this for a while and have slowly built up a stock of everything I can think of that might disappear before I do. Everytime I finish a box of 8x10 Tmax film, I purchase two more. I just recently purchased a lifetime supply of Amidol and as I type this have 4 R40 light bulbs in transit so I can expose Azo well into the future. I think I have a lifetime supply of Azo on hand (Thanks EBay!) but if anybody has any of the old Rochester Grade 2 Azo in 8x10 or 20x24 give me a hollar.

My advice would be to make your own personal list of must have items and increase your purchases until you have established a stockpile. Perhaps the items you cherish won't be discontinued, but in short supply. At least you will have enough to sustain your habit until the manufacturers get more product in the distribution chain.

Even though TMax 400 is still available, it has apparently disappeared from dealer shelves in the 5x7 size. If you shoot this, you will either have to wait for another special order, organize a special order yourself or switch films (a real pain in the butt as far as I'm concerned, because it takes a while to REALLY get to know a film). A well stocked freezer with a year's worth of your favorite films should probably be every serious LF photographer's goal.

In this day and age, if we get caught flat footed by the loss of a product we have no one to blame but ourselves!

William McEwen
25-Nov-2009, 07:33
Tri-X, 8x10 and 120.

Ilford Multigrade/glossy/fiber.