Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Kodak To Stop Making Black and White Paper

Posted by Zonk on from the end-of-an-era dept.

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."

1 of 501 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Who cares .... by Withershins · · Score: 5, Interesting
    B.S.

    As a photographer for 21 years, from 1957 to 1978, where lots of my work came out of a B&W darkroom (and where I did the work with my own little hands), Illford was popular but crap compared to the control one had with Kodak Polycontrast papers (although the Illford filters worked better with Pollycontrast).

    I taught photography and darkroom technique as well as working in advertizing, technical and photojournalism photography. Perhaps your pictures were muddy on Kodak paper because you didn't know how to make a good negative. The extra gamma (contrast) of Illford papers was often a crutch for bad photographers.

    And the only way to let your photo speak for itself instead of being pseudo art was to use a glossy paper (matte and semi-matte was for the photo clubs) although ferrotyping was silly.

    So, now my dream of an exibit of my old work (including the first Woodstock Festival as well as the Vietnam anti-war protests in DC and NYC and Berkeley) in 16x20 and larger is dead?