Oops, I did it again!

SonofaBITCH! (One word, accent on the last syllable. Thank you, Peter O'Toole.)

So, it appears that Kodak is on the verge of going tits-up. For real, this time. Bankruptcy looming, and all that. I can't really say it's a surprise. The end of Kodachrome was a strong indicator that the beast was looking for a quiet porch to crawl under to die in peace. I mean, 75 years on the market, and it was STILL not only unsurpassed, but mostly un-equalled in quality. I really loved shooting those last 18 rolls of outdated Kodachrome I got on eBay.

I nearly missed my daughter's third birthday party because I was stupid enough to leave the house without checking the battery in the camera I was using, and spent too much time running around trying to find one. My wife was NOT amused. But the whole point of the last 18 rolls was to capture important family events while I still could. The E6 slides I shot in college are falling apart, but the Kodachrome slides my parents took when I was a kid are in a carousel tray right next to me as I type, and they still look better than any of my new E6 slides, and they are square, so they came out of a cheap instamatic. The first camera I remember my folks having was a 110 Kodak with the tele switch....

My daughter is already hip to my film fetish, and is showing interest even now, at age 4. Christmas morning, she insisted she be allowed to pull the Fuji film out of my Polaroid Colorpack II. She tried mightily, but isn't strong enough yet to get it. Maybe on one of the cameras with actual rollers, sweetie!

I want her to be able to pull out these trays of slides for her kids, in another 40 years, and tell 'em about their wacky Grandpa and his damn fool idealistic crusade to preserve family memories on film. It'll be just my luck that all these slides will end up on Etsy as kitchen curtains.

So what have I done again? I chose the superior technology over the popular. I did it in 1984 when I bought my first Betamax. I had fallen into the VHS camp first, but when I saw how much better Beta was, I got the Betamax ASAP. You all know how that went.

Then came personal computers. Most of you think the battle was waged between Mac or PC. Not me, gang. I went with an Atari!

That's right, my first computer was an Atari Mega 2. It had the GUI, proccessor and ease of use of the Mac, but the hardware was all taken from the PC camp- external drives, printers-you name it, and you could hook it up to the Atari.

I remember the salesman flipped when I told him what I wanted. "A Mega 2??? Nobody will EVER need 2 megabytes of RAM!" Those were the days. And I am still looking for MIDI sequencing software that works as easily and intuitively as the Masterpiece Pro program we had.

There was that one time, when I wanted a surround system for my stereo. Warner Brothers (WEA) got behind the DVD-Audio format, and the Sony empire was pushing SACD. That's fine if you only want to listen to Alice Cooper OR Pink Floyd. But I wanted to listen to both, and when the Toy Matinee album was re-released on DVD-Audio, I couldn't wait anymore. No one was making a single machine that played both yet, so I bought two players (one for each format) and an entirely new receiver that had not only two sets of analog 5.1 inputs, but a phono input as well (try finding one like THAT nowadays!), and completely re-wired my living room. Unfortunately, the Toy Matinee was re-mixed by Pat Leonard after Kevin Gilbert was dead, so the keys are too prominent, and the guitar part in "Jenny Ledge" we were hoping would be isolated in a back speaker so we could figure it out, was instead not even in the new mix at all. For the record, the best surround disc I own is the SACD of Steve Miller's "Fly Like an Eagle" album. Excellent for laying on the floor with the lights off while watching a midwestern lightning storm through the big windows in my living room.

At that point, I swore I would NEVER get involved in a format war again. I stayed out of the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD battle. I had learned that one of them would win (probably the lesser of the two), and I refused to get into it. In fact, I STILL don't have either one. Blu-Ray obviously won, but I don't care. The kids at Best Buy keep trying to sell me on one, but I don't care. As I told the pushiest of the salesforce, "I just don't want to. When I am watching porn, I don't want to see the stretchmarks on Tera Patrick's ass that clearly." His eyes bugged out, and he said, "Shit, I never thought of it in that context!"

The 3D TV phenomenon is brewing right now, and that might pull me into the new millenium, but not until the issue of incompatible glasses is sorted out. If I can't take my $100 goggles over to a friend's house to watch something on his competitor's TV, then it's not worth doing. I belong to a stereo photography club, and even the hard-core 3D gang in that club won't buy 3D TVs for the same reasons. One of my buddies has an LG TV that uses glasses that aren't electronically tied to the TV, so they are only $10 a pair, so having enough for a room full of people won't break the bank. I suspect that's the way they'll all go in the end. If they go at all.

So what does any of this have to do with Kodak's woes? Nothing, really, I guess. It's just that I spent the afternoon reading the interwebs about Kodak, and now I'm depressed. Just as I make a deep commitment to getting back into film, Kodak chokes on it. KODAK, fer crissakes! They bloody invented just about everything. Well, everything since they invented film, anyway. They even invented digital photography. I bet they're sorry they did THAT now. I feel like everything was going along great until I got back into it, like I'M the kiss of death.  My growing supply of film has taken over the entire top shelf in my freezer, and along with it, my proccessing options have dwindled. Like an equal power crossfade.

Now, I'm not a complete idiot. I knew before I started this binge that the industry was shrinking, but KODAK? Dang.

The weirdest thing is, I generally like Fuji better these days. Fuji's E6 films look more like Kodachrome than the Kodak E6 stuff I have tried. Their print films pop more than the Kodak film does. I mean, depending on what you're looking for, I guess. I always liked more contrast than my teachers back in school, so the contrast and vivid color could just be pandering to my tastes. I picked up a bunch of Arista Legacy B&W film in bulk (re-branded Neopan, by most accounts), and I really like it, especially the 100 (Acros). I have some of the Arista Premium as well. I loaded that stuff up as well, and it's definitely Tri-X, just like I used all the time before music took me away from my camera. I love the edge marking that gives it away (K'ODAK, hee!) too. Now that the Neopan 400 has been discontinued, I bought 5 rolls on eBay, and I bought what may have been 2 of the last three bulk rolls that Freestyle had as Arista Legacy 400. Gee, I hope it's only ok. I don't want to fall in love with another film I'll never be able to use.

I have been gathering a bunch of outdated film on the bay lately. Trying to limit myself to people who claim it was kept in the freezer, but we'll see how that goes. A few months ago, I noticed that 220 film holders for my Mamiya M645 were a lot less expensive than the 120 holders, so I bought a couple, and so I have been watching auctions looking for deals on 220 film. I even just took delivery of 2 rolls of Plus-X in 220 yesterday. That should be fun. No boxes, so who knows how old they are. Fingers crossed....

So, 2 days ago, I pulled out the 645, and loaded a 220 roll of Portra 160 to try. Imagine my irritation when I discovered that the shutter kept sticking open. Battery light says the battery is cool, and so does my volt meter. Tried another battery anyway, but no luck. It opens fine, but then stays there until I hit the battery test/mirror release button. If I hold the red button down while shooting, the shutter runs at the same speed, regardless of the speed set on the knob. I muddled through the rest of the roll, and dropped it off at the lab today, leaving instructions to go ahead and print anything that is more than a blinding white rectangle.

I also gave them a test roll that I just finished in my Ricoh 126 Flex, a roll of Konica 200 SR that was dated 11/94. I bought a brick of ten rolls on eBay, just to get the cartridges. Because one of the windmills I'm tilting at is that I am going to RE-LOAD 126 cartridges and shoot the mini-arsenal of 126 cameras I have built up. Along with the Ricoh, theres a Kodak Instamatic Reflex, a Minolta Autopak 700, a Yashica, a Kodak 500, and an Olympus that has motor-drive. That makes me giggle, auto film-advance on  a 126 camera. What'll they think of next? Laugh if you must, but these cameras all take very nice pictures, head and shoulders above the Instamatic X-15 I bought in a fit of nostalgia.

This 17-year-old Konica film has a pronounced color-shift toward magenta in the prints, but nothing that can't be corrected during printing. I have made a couple attempts at re-loading the cartridges with some non-perf Portra 160 that I found on eBay. Can'ty figure out a good way to perf it so it works in the cameras yet, but I get about 17 out of the 24 shots on my best attempt, and the film looks fine, so I will keep trying.

So, I did it again. I got into a format war, and picked the losing side. I console myself that I can use adapters to put most of my old lenses on my 50D. And I have a freezer full of film to go through, and a little room on the top shelf to stockpile couple rolls of Tri-X and T-max films. Maybe some sheet film for the 4x5. I suppose I better get enough D76 and fixer before it's yanked out from under me as well.