Re: B&W Paper dissapearing

From: Agustin Barrutia <abarrutia@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: B&W Paper dissapearing
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2006 23:14:42 -0300

> Its funny how shops import almost every kind of digital camera
> available in the market, but we just used to get 3 brands of B&W
> paper ( now only one ), and no sheet film larger than 4x5.

Well, that's how the most parts of the world look today... if you go
to Calumet in Cambridge, Massachusetts, you'll probably see the same
situation (though stores around here never carried a lot of darkroom
stuff). But some commercial photographers still shoot 8x10 slides and
scan them to make huge billboards, for example.

Also, the price of products made by Ilford and Forte went up when they
resumed operation. Fuji plans to increase their price by up to 20%
early this year, at least in Japan, to offset the increase in
operation cost. Fuji's price is pretty competitive, so I can
understand some price increase.

From: Kate M <kateb@paradise.net.nz>
Subject: RE: B&W Paper dissapearing
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 18:21:43 +1300

> Wow, now THAT'S customer service! Full marks to Fuji for having a heart.

Well, Fuji's official announcement is a LOT more enthusiastic if you
look at Japanese press release. I'm also glad that they finally
learned to do psychologal war in the export market as well. Fuji is
different from Kodak in that some of the company high ranks are
ex-scientists and ex-engineers who always spent miserable weekends in
their labs and plants when they were told by the above to come up with
competition products within months every time Kodak made innovative
products from 1960s to 1980s. Do you think they are going to easily
ditch products they are so proud of? I doubt it. Those products are
their life. I think they'd rather sell their houses than taking down
tabular grain microfilm (the world's very first tabular grain emulsion
was Kodak's microfilm, which significantly improved resolution), 1600
speed color negative films, etc. from the market. Actually, their
structural reform is already started. Their silver salt products are
manufactured by their wholly owned sibsidiary and so the financial
situation of this subsidiary does not directly affect the finance of
the main corporation.

Now back to other stuff...

> I´m a young guy that got In love with photography when I was 16, and
> a couple of years ago started to experiment with alt processes by
> different reasons. One of them was to be able to make my own
> emulsions, papers and even negatives, so if in the future the silver
> photo business disapears I wouldn´t be affected by the big lost
> (though we all will).

I'm not much different from that, except, I don't really do "alt"
process. Since the time one of my former model started an agency
called "alternative modeling" which is basically a porn actress
agency, I don't believe in the word alternative... (I don't
necessarily condemn pornography, but I don't have much positive
feeling about the word "alternative" to describe what I do.)

I get frequent emails regarding making silver emulsion in darkroom. I try
to answer them whenever I can, especially when the coresspondent
clearly explains his/her expectation. I don't really want to increase
this sort of questions at this point, but I can say that graded paper
emulsion is totally within the scope of alt-process community. A few
people in this list are making one of my simplified formulae (I've
seen a few beautiful scans). At the same time, modern color emulsion
is pretty complicated. To get you some idea, look up the full version
(including figures, which are essential) of US PAtent 6,878,513. By no
means it's an easy reading but it is surprisingly rich of details and
this patent is a good overview of tabular grain technology in past 2
decades. Example 7 is color paper, and examples 2-6 are related to
in-camera negative emulsions (if you read example 4 closely, you can
tell they were still aiming the product for APS when they were doing
this research.) These formulae actually don't incorporate some of very
well known techniques so I suspect their production formulae are
extensively revised from those examples, but using techniques already
described in prior patents.

Some of those people mentioned in column 47 also wrote amazing patents
on t-grain technology. So did Tani (still with Fuji), Urabe (left Fuji
for academia), and many more people. Tani also published last year an
interesting paper in a scientific jounrnal describing silver emulsion
technology from nano technology viewpoint.

> Now, out of topic. What argentinian wines did you drink?. I recomend
> that you get the /Alto-Las Hormigas/. They export their production,
> and if you find the 2002 year its excellent. Actually here in
> Argentina the 2002 was an excellent year for almost every
> winery. 2003 was good to, but not as 2002. And 2004 is not
> recomended.

Altos Las Hormigas is one of the brands I follow every year. They were
very good in 1997, 1999, and 2002 as you say. I think 1995 was another
excellent year. Indeed, at around the end of summer in the south, I
occasionally check Andes Times homepage to see if Mendoza is dry. 1998
and 2004 were not very good because of El Nino bringing too much
rain. In 2004 the rain was so intermittent and strong sun came and go
(well, that's typical of New England weather) grapes were ruined so
badly. But some vineyards harvested grapes very early to avoid the
rain and made interesting wine in those bad years, so let's see how
things turn out.

Anyway a 750ml bottle of Altos LAs Hormigas used to cost USD8 or so
but now it's well above 10... Other favorites are Nicholas Catena,
Santa Julia (their Torrontes is one of my favorite whites, together
with Costamolino from Sardinia and for ligther stuff, some fine
Orvieto, but I don't know if Bob Kiss would approve this.), Valentin
Bianchi, Trumpeter, Bodegas Salentein, etc. Sometimes I like more
bold, strongly oaky ones, and they are Bodegas Terrazas, Bodegas
Norton, Finca Flitchman, etc. (Either those or Taurino Salice
Salentino and Copertino from Puglia.)

Ok, the list is getting longer but there are lots of other
stuff... and also good stuff from Georgea, Hungary, Portugal, and
other places as well.
Received on Wed Jan 25 03:01:21 2006