h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

No more Ilford paper? As a b&w hobbyist I'm alarmed. As for the purpose of b&w photography, there is something soothing (for me anyway) about locking that door and perfecting a print - watching something develop in those little trays.

I totally agree. I learned photography the hard way, hand held light meter & dodgy old enlarger, so i am probably old fashioned in the extreme, but since i have just had an exhibition which seems to be pretty popular, of prints made the "old" way, i too bemoan the passing of Ilford.

I bet someone rescues it though & it will achieve specialist status, which might be a bonus for those of us who still remember how to actually print a real photograph. Anyway, i have about 36,000 negatives, if there is no means of printing them up, i am a bit stuffed!

RIP Henri Cartier Bresson.

Terri.

Terri,

There are film scanners on the market which allow you to scan in negatives to a PC. You can pick a good cheap one up for about £120. Friends have bought £800 ones which have been no better and sometimes worse.

I do believe you can dodge and burn photographs using the various photo software packages available so you would still have that option. There are also some excellent and relatively cheap colour printers around which give superb prints - I have a number of my own hangig up around my house at about A4 and even close up there is no pixelation.

I think you might have to become a bit choosy over which of your 36,000 negatives you do scan in unless you want to spend a solid 50days scanning them in (based on 2 minutes turn round for each scan).

Perhaps one of the other makers of films and papers will pick up some of the pieces of the business if it comes to that. Though Ilford may be the biggest thing in B&W film, they're not the only ones. There is at least one other B&W paper maker in the UK, Kentmere. Traditional films are also still made (think Maco, Tura and others).

While Ilford had the bulk of their business photographic stuff they did other things for digital, some very nice inkjet papers (I guess a hundred years of experience in coating paper helped them ) and the bit of the business that made money was a specialist inkjet ink manufacturer.

What I'm trying to say I think is that even if there is no Ilford Imaging in the future there will still be other people out there who can provide alternatives. Still it would be a shame if their factory out in Cheshire was shut down and sold off.

I'm sure there will always remain a market, just as there is still a market for suits of armour. What they probably did wrong was not downsize at the right time. Whether we like it or not, the digital photography age has taken over but this thread has certainly demonstrated that there are still those who will want to use the traditional methods.

I've still got my enlarger & was looking forward to setting up a darkroom now i finally have a place which is suitable.

The photoshop here is still, at present, selling Ilford paper & chemicals. What happened to XP1 film, that was pretty revolutionary , as for dear old HP5 & FP4, i suppose i am talking history? I disappeared from the scene pretty much in 1985, when i went to Africa, before that, i was a professional freelance phortographer & could give anyone a run for their money in film & darkroom stuff, when i photographed punk bands who were using car headlights for lighting, i would regularly push HP5 to 6400 ASA & stew it, or even use recording film, anything to get an image, no matter how grainy & contrasty. If you know what you are doing in the wet, smelly, real life darkroom, you can haul an image out of this sort of neg, BUT i have tried putting them through a scanner /printer, it just insists "ain't nothing there".

I used to order grade 4 & even 5 Ilford paper from my local photo shop.

Presumably Paterson have also gone bust?

zdt

XP1 became XP2 and now XP2 Super. Still available as are chromogenic B&W films from Kodak, Fuji (I think they did a deal with Ilford about that one) and Konica. FP4 and HP5 are still around as is Tri-X from Kodak. Then there are the more modern technology films the Delta series from Ilford (100, 400 and 3200), with the 3200 designed to be pushed from 3200 speed upwards and the Kodak T-Max range.

http://www.patersonphotographic.com/ don't seem to have gone bust yet.

YIPPEE!! I actually understand all that you are talking about; my god, i can talk photo numbers still!!!

for all that info, very useful!

zdt

Negatives and prints are pretty easy to store. Dark dry and cool and they're fine indefinately: pretty much like computer media but a longer shelf life; hung on the wall out of strong direct light, a print will fade a little over time - but is still photographically recoverable.

Digital media need transferring. From Punch cards, to ticker tape, to reel to reel, to cassette tape, to 8" floppy, to 5 1/2" floppy, to 3 1/4", to CD, to DVD, to Bluelight, etc. This may seem an extreme example, but i'm only thirty two and i began using computers with ticker tape data storage. Anything i wanted to keep would have had to be updated and updated - or disgarded along the way.

I have several hundred thousand negatives - most people have a couple of thousand. Have i got time to transfer those images from disc to disc every couple of years? I'm going to start leaving images behind, acidentally overlooking them, or making qualitative decisions about them.

And i'm not sure if you can get all of the detail of a single frame of neg on a DVD, but you sure as hell can't on a CD. There's the storage space to think about.

If i move into a new house and clear out the attic an find some negs, from the 1980's, or the 1940's or the 1840's - i can make a print from it within 10 minutes. No digging around for specialist programs or antiquated hardware, no difficutly analising the file type. Anyone can do it straight away. Photography is so accessable, so simple.

Photography is the single most common communication medium in the world, and has been for getting on a hundred years. It would be awful if that technology was only in the hands of specialists. We would, and probibly will, lose most of the information we have about the last hundred years.

Photography brought us the modern age. It gave us a new kind of understanding of ourselves, of each other, of time, of history, of our place within it, of the world and of change. It will be a very different age without it.

Well said!

Terri.

I'm alarmed at the idea that somehow "digital" is the same as film.

Have any of you ever taken a really good look at the work of Ansel Adams? He did that work, with a 4x5 format pinhole camera. Glass plate, then sheets of film -- not pixels. NO digital camera can produce the depth of field that a pinhole camera can, with or without photoshop.*

The owner of the camera store I used to work in collected pinhole cameras. Last time I was in there, I smarted off about digital (back when it was very new!) and he sat me down with a couple of prints from Ansel Adams' own negatives. I saw the light, literally. He carried an extraordinary number of types of B&W film from Ilford.

SC

*IMNSHO

Surely depth of field is just a matter of optics and aperature size?

First off, here here Persephone. I agree.
Unfortunatley I do not understand too much about all the numbers as I am(was?)only a beginner in traditional photography but I thoroughly enjoyed it; much more so than the frustration of trying to figure out shade adjustment etc. on the computer. I dislike doing pictures that way; it is not "hands on" to me; you are not slooshing the paper around in the chemicals and watching it change before your eyes; something more "I did this" about it.....
Much less frustrating too! I've got my computer colours in photoshop or whatever it is so messed up everyone always looks green or yellow and I've played with it till I'm blue in the face(literally;on screen , and now nothing comes out right and I could care less and wish all this digital C**P would fold and the good stuff would come back.....(not that I wish people would loose jobs or anything)
I personally don't believe even the best digital B & W would be as good as a mediocre "real" b & w.

Bouncy said: "Surely depth of field is just a matter of optics and aperature size? "

That's pretty much what I said; my boss told me that no matter the aperature, you can't get a modern lens down to the size used in a pinhole camera. The amount of glass in an adjustable lens will distort the image and cut down on the light at a comparable aperature.

Would one of our researchers try to duplicate the effect of a pinhole 4x5 format camera, and report back? CAN you duplicate that clarity?

I have a s**t digital, a freebie, worth every penny I paid for it. I do have an old copy of photoshop; I'll take a stab at this, too, within my limitations!

SC

I went and dug out some links...
http://www.artfifa.com/download/010.jpg
http://www.archives.gov/media_desk/press_kits/picturing_the_century_photo_gallery/grand_canyon_south_rim.jpg
http://www.archives.gov/media_desk/press_kits/picturing_the_century_photo_gallery/tetons_snake_river.jpg

and http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/encyclopaedia/hutchinson/m0003338.html

and finally...
http://www.bossanova.com/kia/angeleno/archives/000951.html

"If you want to make a digital pinhole camera, you need a camera that has a removable lens (I have a Canon digital SLR). You can try taping a pinhole over the lens of your digital camera, but I can't vouch for the results.

For the pinhole, you need to get brass shim material at a hobby or hardware store (it's almost like tinfoil, really thin small sheets of brass - you can actually cut it with scissors) and poke a piece with a needle until it makes a small bump but doesn't totally go through the shim. Then you sand the bump off with some fine grit sandpaper and you end up with a nice flat sheet of brass with a teeeeeny tiny hole. Get a body cap for your digital camera (my Canon 10D takes standard EOS caps which are cheap) and cut a big hole in it, then tape the brass shim with the tiny hole over the big hole in the body cap with some black photo or gaffer tape. Then screw the body cap onto the body of your camera. Voila! Digital pinhole camera".

There is a limit to how small a hole to make. A fellow student of mine in photography school did his masters thesis on pinhole cameras. I wish I could remember what gauge pin he used. (He did poke the hole through with the pin so he could have a consistant size hole). If the hole is smaller than the wavelength of the light coming through you can get single slit interference patterns.

Lens vs. pinhole is the least of the debates - when it comes to detail, there's still the fact that your digital photocell is not as subtle as the atomic structure of the crystal surfaces on film, and then again when we print (remember were losing analog printing here too). Then there's the loss of genuine shutterspeed, the play of movement becomes a matter of programming, much more than it ever was before, because your not setting the hardware, you're setting the way the hardware interprets the data.

Where I work we now print digitally on traditional photographic materials. Whether we are working from a digital original image or an image scanned from film we print using digital printers that use LEDs or lasers to "project" the image onto colour photographic paper which we then process traditionally. We get much better results this way than either traditional enlarger based printing or laser jet/ink jet dry or dye sublimation printers. Of course we also have a multi million dollar waste water processing facility that removes all contaminants before the deionised water is returned to our system. Unfortunately traditional photographic processes do contain many ecologically damaging materials.

But wow do our prints look great!

As has been mentioned, the detail level of films will be surpassed by those of digital sensors, and it won't be a long time before it happens.

How is exposing a film for x amount of time different to setting a sensor to collect data for x amount of time? Either way its just recording numbers and energies of photons.

Sorry, but I don't agree, BouncyBadgerInTheMiddle. But that's just my not so humble opinion.

My boss had a collection of pinhole cameras, some of them a hundred years old. They were beautiful, made of wood and brass, some of them.

When L.A. had it's "insurrection" (read looting spree! ) in 1992, the original camera store was burned to the ground, with all the boss' collection in it. Sad day.

SC