I'm a day behind in posting this because I didn't have time to be on PBase yesterday. Nor indeed do I have time tonight, but unfortunately opportunity cost is like that when it comes to both money and time.

The history of photography as we know it would have been very different without George Eastman and his Kodak company. (I qualify that with "as we know it" because just as I don't believe that Steve Jobs was essential to the "i" tools that we have today, it's entirely possible that we would have arrived at the same point in photography (more or less) without Kodak. In both cases the combination of consumer demand and technological advancement was leading inexorably in one direction anyway. In a world without Apple we may have had, say, Commodore filling that role based on the Amiga and its offspring, and had Kodak not existed someone else (Edison, possibly?) may have stepped in to fill that role. But certainly as things have turned out in this particular brane of the multiverse, Kodak was the one which was a huge influence.)

Kodak even got me into photography, but not in a good way unfortunately. I had (still have) a 35mm Kodak VR35. No AV, TV or manual mode here; you half-pressed the shutter until the single person, double person or mountain icon lit up in the viewfinder depending on the range of the subject. It served me well in the late '80's. It failed me miserably in my one trip to the west coast of the US at the end of the last millennium. That was when I decided to start learning photography properly and the rest is history.

Up until a couple of weeks ago this supermarket had three rolls of Kodak ISO 400 film on this shelf which I had seen there for... I have no idea how long. I think that they would have remained there indefinitely (after all, film shooters probably wouldn't even think of trying to get film from a supermarket) and I went to shoot it this day only to find... the entire section had been refurbished. The film was gone, probably binned, but in its place were other Kodak products; stacks and stacks of CD-R disks.

CD-R? Seriously? I mean, I grant you that I still use them occasionally but only because my office computer is a 7 year old dinosaur. But given the choice if something needs burning, I burn it to a DVD.

Oh, the relevance, right. Kodak, once the giant of the film and camera industry, filed for bankruptcy last Thursday. I recall reading that in Australia film usage peaked in 2000 (not coincidentally, I think, the year of the Sydney Olympics) and has been dropping somewhere between steadily and precipitously ever since. I do wish Kodak success in its attempt to reinvent itself... but I'm not sure that a fading technology like CD-Rs is going to do that. You could almost put the film back on the shelves.

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