Opening Note

This is our first newsletter, and it opens on the question everyone seems to be asking: is film too expensive? In news, Nikon has opened two months of work on F, FM and FE bodies in Japan — cleaning, inspection, adjustment, light seals. Replacement parts are generally unavailable, so the program repairs but does not refurbish.

On Grainpress

The Weight of Every Frame: How to Approach the Rising Cost of Film

Boxes of Kodak, Ilford, and Fujifilm black-and-white film arranged among photography books

Tri-X, 36 exposures: $1.95 in June 1977, $3.69 in 2005, $8.95 today. Adjust for inflation and the 1977 roll costs $10.73 in current money and the 2005 roll $6.34, which makes the cheap decade the anomaly rather than the expensive one. The piece then prices the part that usually goes uncounted, which is what it takes to see the work. Modelled over seven years at a roll a week, a 1977 home darkroom comes to about $8.97 a roll in equipment, paper and chemistry; a Nikon Zf, a 50mm macro and a Valoi Easy35 come to $8.72. Across the whole chain that is about 99¢ a frame then and about 56¢ now. Film has not outrun 1977. What it now sits beside is a digital frame at 23¢, and a habit that knows at every moment it could stop being disciplined.

Scanning at Home, Part One: Choosing Your Way In

New York, New York. Photo engraving department of the New York Times newspaper. Examining the dots on the screen of a strip negative in the darkroom before it is transferred to a zinc plate

Four ways in are now genuinely workable, and choosing between them is harder than finding one. The Epson V600 is still made, still takes 35mm through 4×5 on one glass bed, and still resolves well under its advertised figures, which costs almost nothing on a 6×7 negative and a great deal on a frame the size of a postage stamp. A dedicated scanner narrows the job and does it better: a clean Coolscan runs $900 to $2,000 and remains a working tool only because VueScan and SilverFast each maintain their own drivers for hardware Nikon dropped nearly twenty years ago. Camera scanning produces the best files most people will get at home, once the macro lens is bought and the alignment learned. One limit holds whatever the machine cost. Digital ICE reads color and chromogenic film only, so conventional silver black-and-white is spotted by hand.

Photography Beyond the Like Button

The gains are real, and the piece says so first: the platforms find the six other people restoring the same folding camera, fill workshops, get photobooks published, bring clients. What they charge is a change of form. The photograph has to become a post, two inches wide, read in a second, scrolling past a wedding and an advertisement. Alasdair MacIntyre's distinction is the useful tool here. External goods are money, status, recognition, opportunity, and they are genuinely worth having. Internal goods can only be had by doing the work, and they are the reason for doing it at all. The trouble starts when the scoreboard built to count the first begins grading the second. The remedies offered are small ones: make the picture before you think about the post, keep editing separate from sharing, and find two or three people whose eyes you trust.

News

Nikon Offers Limited Film-Camera Maintenance in Japan

Nikon Imaging Japan is taking applications from 1 September to 30 October to service selected manual-focus bodies, in the F, F2, F3, FM, FM2, FE and FE2 families, along with eligible manual-focus Nikkor primes. Bodies get cleaning, inspection, available adjustments and, where required, new light seals; lenses get cleaning, adjustment and fresh helicoid grease. The program runs in Japan only. Nikon's own qualification is the sentence that matters: replacement parts are generally unavailable, so a failed component still puts a camera outside the offer. This is an inspection by the manufacturer while the knowledge and the consumables last, not a restoration.

Kodak's 40 Percent: What the Quarter Actually Says About Film

The Kodak tower in Rochester, New York, its upper storeys lettered KODAK, seen from street level past the Monroe Community College building under a clouded sky.|Kodak's headquarters tower in Rochester, New York. Photograph by Warren LeMay via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

One line from the second-quarter release of August 4th stood out recently. Advanced Materials & Chemicals revenue of $105 million against $75 million a year earlier, up 40 percent. That segment reports motion picture film, still film, pharmaceutical coating and battery-materials work together. Kodak publishes no revenue line for still film, the release does not use the phrase, and the film growth described on the earnings call was motion picture. Whether still-film volume grew is not a question the filing answers. The figure in the same documents that will reach the shelf is silver: inventory rose $37 million across the first half, with silver, in management's own words, more than double year-end levels.

Have a Look

Harry Callahan's 1975 Oral History Interview

Robert Brown recorded Harry Callahan in Providence on 13 February 1975, and the Archives of American Art has the whole transcript online and free: 41 pages from a tape running an hour and 27 minutes. Callahan was 62, on sabbatical, fourteen years into the photography department he had started at RISD. What makes it worth the hour is how little he decorates. He went in 1938 to price a movie camera, heard the number, and left with a still camera instead. After Ansel Adams spoke at his Detroit camera club, Callahan got him alone on the field trip afterward with a notebook and asked what lenses, what film, what paper, what developer: "Put it all down and that was my bible for over a year. I wouldn't dare use anything different." He then bought an eight-by-ten and contact-printed everything, a contact print being the sharpest thing available to him. On printing he refuses the question — "There isn't just one way to print as far as I'm concerned" — and a moment later, "I can destroy reality; it doesn't bother me either." The Archives notes that the recording quality is uneven and the transcription carries gaps. Read the transcript

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