I live about an hour's drive from the US boarder, but even with supposed
'free trade' between US-CDN, you wonder if those trade pacts were only
drawn up for the big guys such as GM or MircroSoft, etc. I could fil a
book with "horror stories", but one short example. UPS shipped a telescope
from California to Detriot, Michigan for me for $30, but then charged me an
additional $57 for the two hour drive to my house form Detriot, based on
"brokerage fees" (although the telescope was completely duty free). The
same story applies to other shipping companies and agencies. Then
envromental laws, shipping regulations, etc, etc, keep comming into play.
I can identify with the comment from California about someday all chemical
agents being banned under soem imagined health risk. Not to downplay the
good work of envriomentalists, but public opinion seems to swing like a
pendulem form one extreme to another, and at the rate things are going now,
I'm supprized somebody has not banned water or air as a toxic agent. :)
One thought I have is how the rareity of materials seems to add to the
mystique of a hobby or a process. For example, conventional B&W materials
are slowly dissappearing off the shelves of many cmaera shelves, from what
I can observe. The harder it is to find some of these materials, the more
the value of the alternative process appears to take on.
Assume for arguements sake palladium salts for photographic use were
readily available in just about every drugstore/chemist/pharmacy around the
world. Ready made kits, just pick up, 5 minutes easy work, and off you
go. Would then more people actually use that process? One of the oldest
rules of marketing is "availability creates demand", but I sometimes feel
that in some cases, the opposite would actually happen. For example, if
anyone person could easily walk up the summit of Mt. Everest, then the lure
of climbng that mountian would be lost, for it is the sum of all the parts
that creates the whole experince of climbing that mountian. Sometimes
stories of how hard it was to drag supplies up the mountian are just as
facinating as the climb itself.
My apologies for rambling on off topic so much. When I write stores, I
find that it is just as facinating to write abotu people themselves, what
motivates them, what they have to overcome to produce their work as opposed
to just tlaking about the work itself. My apologies too for the poor
spelling - no spell checker on this software, and my dyslexia kicks in form
time to time.
One last thought - personally I did not ever think in the past of colour
dye transfer as an alternative process on par with say carbon printing or
platinum/palladium processes, but the way our society is headed with new
C41 B&W films, digital imaging, etc, at some point in time, the gernal
public will probally see simple B&W printing as an alternative process.
joe
http://www.multiboard.com/~joneil
B&W, Large Format Images From Southern Ontario