After Kodak announced the end of Kodachrome’s production in June of 2009, the number of photo labs that developed the film began to dwindle until finally only Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas remained as the lone certified Kodachrome processing facility in the world. Today, they will be processing their last roll of Kodachrome, bringing the film’s storied career in the photo industry to an end. CBS News Sunday Morning did a neat feature looking back on the popular film.

This is a Kodak advertisement that ran in the The Saturday Evening Post 100 years ago, on April 30th, 1910, and shows how people back then gave their children a taste of photography.

(via The Online Photographer)

Earlier this month Kodak announced their new Portra 400 color negative film, replacing the Portra 400NC and 400VC professional films. This might seem like backwards thinking, since so many films have been discontinued as of late, but Kodak believes film is making a comeback. In an interview with the British Journal of Photography, Kodak’s US marketing manager Scott DiSabato states,

We won’t make a product like this if we don’t believe we’ll see a return on it. Luckily the colour negative film sales have been very stable over the past year. Black-and-white is also doing extremely well. It almost feel that there is a very real resurgence for film.

A lifeline for film seems to be college campuses, where many young people are introduced to 35mm film photography for the first time (like I was):

[...] the most exciting thing is to see the younger people adopt film. It’s almost a generational thing. They have not shot film growing up, but once they do get a hold of film in a university, they just seem to fall in love with it. And that’s exciting. It just seems to have a lot of influence.

You can read the entire interview here. What are your thoughts on the future of film photography?

(via Wired)

Remember the 102-year-old lens experiment we shared a week ago? Daire Quinlan did something similar — he combined his grandfather’s 6×9 Pocket Kodak lens from 1920 (90 years ago) with homemade bellows to create his own tilt-shift lens to play with. Unlike Timur Civan, who used his 102-year-old lens on a 5D Mark II, Quinlan used his frankenlens with a Nikon film camera.
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Here’s an interesting clip of a color film test done by Kodak in 1922, years before color movies started appearing. This is 13 years before the first full-length color film appeared, and 7 years before the first Oscar was awarded. You can read more about this clip on the Kodak blog.
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If you’re a digital photography buff, here’s some required trivia knowledge: what you see above is a photograph of the first digital camera ever built. It was created in December 1975 by an engineer at Eastman Kodak named Steve Sasson, now regarded as the inventor of the digital camera. In a Kodak blog post written in 2007, Sasson explains how it was constructed:

It had a lens that we took from a used parts bin from the Super 8 movie camera production line downstairs from our little lab on the second floor in Bldg 4. On the side of our portable contraption, we shoehorned in a portable digital cassette instrumentation recorder. Add to that 16 nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter application, several dozen digital and analog circuits all wired together on approximately half a dozen circuit boards, and you have our interpretation of what a portable all electronic still camera might look like.

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It’s the end of an era. Photojournalist Steve McCurry has developed the last roll of Kodachrome film produced by Kodak.

National Geographic has been following the final journey of the last Kodachrome roll ever since Kodak’s announcement last year that it would retire Kodachrome. Kodak has been manufacturing Kodachrome since 1935.

McCurry developed 36 slides on Monday at Dwayne’s Photo Service in Parsons, Kansas, which is the last labs to process the film type. The final images were shot in New York City, but the last three frames were taken in Parsons.

If you’ve got undeveloped canisters of Kodachrome of your own, Dwayne’s will develop them only through December of this year.

(via Associated Press)

Kodak made the surprising announcement today that their Chief Marketing Officer Jeffrey Hayzlett is resigning on May 28th to “pursue personal projects.”

Hayzlett recently authored a book on his experiences with marketing and brand-building, called The Mirror Test: Is Your Business Really Breathing?, which he has been actively promoting on a tour and Twitter over the last few months.

Hayzlett, who has been with Kodak since April 2006, is known for his accessible public presence, especially on Twitter. Though Hayzlett was often criticized for his over-sharing, strong persona via social media, he said that sharing his knowledge, especially about his use of social media as a tool, is key to his success in bringing Kodak back into the public eye.

The CMO has more than 21,000 followers, and has used the social media site to engage with customers, sometimes with literally biting exchanges. In an interview with the Huffington Post, Hayzlett said:

“I’ve had in the corporate world my public relations, community relations people walk up to me and say Jeff, I don’t think this is appropriate that you wrote “Bite Me” to this guy. I look at them and I go, well that’s who I am. The guy said something very offensive, he had no right to say it, I’m sorry. They say well please be nicer, so now I write “Please Bite Me”.

Kodak says Hayzlett will be involved with the company through August as he transitions out.

Even as Hayzlett is leaving, Kodak is sticking to developing its online presence by launching a new photo sharing website, Kodak Moments.

Photos and videos, along with captions, can be uploaded to the interactive community site. Users then tag the photo with a certain emotion. User-submitted photos can be browsed by emotion, and other viewers can tag them with emotions they feel in response. The site also has “Moments,” which are official events by Kodak, such as the Burton US Open, Celebrity Apprentice, and the People’s Choice Awards.

Kodak Interactive Marketing Manager, Mike Mayfield said that images uploaded will be displayed in email newsletters, marketing, Times Square Billboard, and other marketing outlets.

Some photographers may be uneasy with uploading, since the rather broad Terms of Service currently states:

In consideration of acceptance of my submitted photo, video and/or story (“Contribution”) as part of KODAK Moments, I hereby grant Kodak, and others with Kodak’s consent, the right to edit, copy, distribute, publish, display and otherwise use the Contribution for purposes of the KODAK Moments program without attribution, consideration or compensation to me, the photographer, my successors or assigns or any other individual or entity.

Mayfield responded to the concern, saying:

Kodak has great respect for the rights and use of images we receive. Images submitted to the KODAK Moments website will only be used in the context of promoting the KODAK Moments program. The language in the terms of service stating it could be used for any advertising or publicity is an oversight and we are correcting the terms so that language is removed. We have received some wonderful submissions and if we do decide we would like to use those images outside of the KODAK Moments program, we will reach out and obtain permission from the photographer before doing so.

So it sounds like Kodak still has to hash out some legal jargon, but at least they’ll ask your permission before running specific photos in their ads, albeit possibly without attribution.

(via PDN)

In 1998, this US Navy photo was published, showing a Nikonos camera no one recognized from the IPTC caption:

NAVAL AIR BASE CORONADO, California (June 8, 1998) — Navy SEALs attached to SEAL Team One, Naval Air Base Coronado, CA, conducts training using the Nikon/Kodak DCS 425 underwater digital camera which can sends real time digital images to decision makers, and an LPI LPD tracking device uses brevity codes to send both mission status and precise longitude/latitude. U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Ted Banks. (RELEASED)

The enigmatic photo and description sparked much interest — this is a digital SLR that requires no underwater casing, and was far advanced for its time with its built-in tracking, real-time uploading, GPS, and communications. The underwater film Nikonos RS camera existed on the market already, but this futuristic iteration was unheard of in 1998.

What’s more, Kodak denied existence of the camera altogether. When Jarle Aasland of NikonWeb did some research into the matter in 2005, Kodak told him:

“I’m sorry but those cameras never existed here at Eastman Kodak. We never made cameras for that specific use. The information you have is incorrect.”

Another Kodak source told him:

“I think the issue is who they were made for.”

After further investigation into the mythical camera, Aasland finally found photos of the camera listed on eBay, hard evidence of the cameras existence. He published a story on his findings.

Days after Aasland published his article, he was contacted by Kodak’s lead engineer for the DCS cameras, Jim McGarvey. As it turns out, the camera was not quite top secret, but it was so low-profile that few knew about it, including Kodak Professional, McGarvey said. Quite simply, the specialized cameras were not advertised on a consumer level, since they were designed for government use, McGarvey wrote:

“The Nikonos body cameras were made by Kodak’s Commercial & Government Systems division. Through most of the DCS years, that group would take our commercial camera designs and adapt them for government and other special needs. Some of that work was secret, but most of the products were simply only marketed in limited venues and didn’t appear on the commer[c]ical photography radar screens. I don’t think the Nikonos cameras were ever actually secret.

…I have no idea how many Nikonos units were built, but I doubt the total would be over 100. They had no super secret special communications stuff, just standard DCS420 features.”

While it’s still highly unlikely that we’ll see such a formidable does-it-all camera on the mainstream market anytime soon, it’s pretty fascinating to see how today’s consumer products are taking a step in that direction. Some 12 years after the legendary digital Nikonos, we’ve got cameras equipped with GPS, wi-fi enabled cards for real-time uploading, and a plethora of hardy, underwater point-and-shoots on the market.

(via Nikon Rumors)

Here’s a fun concept design imagining the classic Kodak Brownie reintroduced to for the 2012 London Olympic games as a simple digital camera. Designer James Coleman says,

After researching the history of the Brownie I realised that Kodak often made special edition Brownies for major events such as World Fairs or anniversaries. Being from London, I chose to design a Brownie for the upcoming 2012 Olympic games.

The only control on the camera is the shutter button, and it has three lenses — two for the viewfinders and one for the actual exposure. Rather than looking at an LCD screen or pressing a viewfinder to your face, you gaze into one of the two viewfinders from above depending on whether you’re shooting a landscape or portrait image.

What do you think of this design? Would you enjoy it as a novel “toy” digital camera?

(via Wired)