Kodak To Stop Making Black and White Paper

Swirsky writes "For those of us who remember spending quality time in a dark room with Kodak Rapid RC paper and a bottle of Dektol, here's some bad news - Kodak will stop making black and white photographic paper. Black and white photo work (especially because you can use a safelight!) is a wonderful way of introducing someone to photography. I guess if we want to do it, we'll have to use home-made emulsions on paper. As a pro photographer, I'm bothered by this, though admittedly I haven't done b/w darkroom work in years."

Comments

Who cares ....

[anagama]

Ilford fine grain semi-matte was always way better than any muddy paper kodak made.

Or Portriga -- Agfa is good too.

Re:Who cares ....

[ozmanjusri]

Ilford appears to have recovered well from their bankruptcy, and Kentmere and Foma are still making great paper. I don't think b&w will be going anywhere soon.

Re:Mod parent DOWN

[troc]

Exactly, "wet" photography has a significantly greater dynamic range than digital. However it is easier to make a photo with a very large dynamic range using digital cameras and Photoshop. Needs a tripod.

Simply set up camera and tripod (this is excellend for landscapes). Expose for the sky, take image (foreground vastly underexposed). Expose for foreground, take image (sky blown out). Take a few more at other exposures, maybe to get the exposure of a flower or the sea or something. Important bit is that the tripod doesn't move :) (mirror lock up blah blah blah)

Put them all into PS and use the combine function whose name escapes me and it will stitch them together using the whole range of exposures. For example, the average decent digital SLR can expose around 6 levels of exposure (8 for generic film). Doing this you can easily get a photo with 10+ exposure levels which means everything in the photo is properly exposed.

To do the same with film requires various gradient filters and eitehr blind luck (me) or lots of knowledge (photo pro)

Hmm

Troc.

Re:This occured to me, too

[njcoder]

This doesn't really matter. It's been years since Kodak has been the top bw paper manufacturer. It seems that the majority of their sales have been to more professional labs than to the small darkroom market. The biggest supplier is probably Ilford. There are also other less popular manufacturers that make what some people consider higher quality paper such as Oriental. These companies are smaller and they can make a successful business case for continuing to produce bw paper more thann Kodak can.

I've probably made thousands of black and white prints and I have never printed on kodak black and white paper. Although I do like their color papers when I print color.

I shoot digital as well as traditional film and I do my own printing for color and black and white as well as color and I also send stuff out to digital printers as well. Traditional film printing, especially from larger negatives can be a lot nicer than digital. Especially when it comes to black and white. A nice hand printed black and white print on fiber paper has a certain depth and richness that you can't achive on dye based papers.

There's no need to start making your own emulsions. There are still plenty of other options.