Bad luck played a role, too. Kodak thought that the thousands of chemicals its researchers had created for use in film might instead be turned into drugs. But its pharmaceutical operations fizzled, and were sold in the 1990s.

Fujifilm diversified more successfully. Film is a bit like skin: both contain collagen. Just as photos fade because of oxidation, cosmetics firms would like you to think that skin is preserved with anti-oxidants. In Fujifilm’s library of 200,000 chemical compounds, some 4,000 are related to anti-oxidants. So the company launched a line of cosmetics, called Astalift, which is sold in Asia and is being launched in Europe this year.

And so Kodak has filed for bankruptcy. And I feel sad about it. But it's just another big company. I think I'm attached to Kodak though because my first ever camera was a Kodak instamatic taking 1190 film (I still have it incidentally)

More of Heinz Maier's splash photography can be found in his flickr set

There's definitely something Van Gogh about this image for me

'We worked really hard to create an iconic design that really conveys the idea that this is "camera 3.0",' he says: 'We really wanted, in the industrial design, for form to follow function.' And, while we've not used it enough to say how functional its form is, the result is a device that, unlike many cameras, doesn't have any film-era roots to its design.

and

'It's very easy to get caught up in the specs of a device, but cameras are devices for taking pictures and sharing stories. We want to make the picture that is most meaningful. If people are sharing their images on Facebook, they're not using all those megapixels.'

I found myself nodding along to a lot of this article, and I'm interested to see where this goes. Like I said last time I posted about this camera earlier it's pleasant to see someone going back to basics and not being tied to a design that was influenced by earlier technology

The team at Lytro is completing the job of a century’s worth of theory and exploration about light fields. Lytro’s engineers and scientists have taken light fields out of the lab – miniaturizing a roomful of cameras tethered to a supercomputer and making it fit in your pocket

Richard spotted an article about this in the economist last week and I had a quick read and liked what I saw. It sounds like this isn't, yet, going to enable you to take take photos that are of a printable quality, but realistically, how many photographs get printed these days - sadly very few I suspect. What they say on the mexapixel/size issue is the following, which I don't quite understand

The amount of megapixels, or resolution, is fundamentally about how big of a 2D photograph one can print. So, when viewed on even big screen monitors, the 14 megapixel camera ends up throwing away over 90% of the pixels. In fact, the lens on most point-and-shoots have a fraction of the resolution of their sensors. With light field technology, we make use of the pixels you would traditionally throw away. We use those pixels to retain the depth information of the scene. Light field resolution provides better than HD quality today.

I like that this is a different way of using light and technology. I like that it isn't just a "replace film with sensor and operate as normal" solution, but something that has been thought about, and I'm interested to see what happens next.

But also, how many companies get to include the following sentence on their website?

Want to learn more? Check out the Lytro Blog. Want to learn a lot more? Read our CEO’s dissertation.

Lovely photographs. Sunflowers are amongst my favourite flowers as they're so happy and bright and cheerful. Thinking about this a bit more though makes me wonder, is an exploded sunflower still a happy flower?

On Assignment from Camp 4 Collective on Vimeo.

delightful...

the site is only possible because of the relative permanence of analogue photography. The images on the site are, of course, digital, but they could only have been created using old photographic prints. All of which means that it will be very difficult to do something like this in 30 years' time.

When Dad died, and I had to empty the family home, I brought home lots and lots of photographs. Some are annotated, some are not. Some are in albums, many (the vast majority) are not. We gathered all of these together, the prints, the slides, but not the albums, and added our own piles of photographs to them too and sent them all off to Click2Scan to be scanned. A total of 6600+ photographs. All waiting to be tagged, processed and for something to happen to them/with them. The physical images themselves will then go into the loft and stay there. The same will happen with the slides, but they had already degraded much quicker than the prints and so their lifespan is finite.

I've got into the habit, in recent years, of making photo books of significant events - holidays, celebrations etc - and am considering putting together more books from this incredible digital archive I now have. Something physical, that I can flip through, and revisit when I feel the need.

Flickr user Céline Ramoni has a beautiful set of photographs shot from the Yurikamome rail line connecting the cities of Shimbashi and Toyosu in Japan. The exposure times aren’t too long (they’re all less than a second), but the speed of the train creates plenty of motion blur — even in daytime.

You can check out the rest of the photos in this Flickr set.

(via Colossal via Laughing Squid)

Image credits: Photographs by Céline Ramoni and used with permission

Lovely