Kodak in Trouble?

In a report that went out on Monday, Kodak noted that their gross profit fell about 12%, or $7 million, declining from $58 million in the second quarter of 2024 to $51 million in the second quarter of 2025, and that it had upcoming debt obligations that need to be fulfilled within the next year. There were concerns that Kodak would disappear.

Kodak pushed back, releasing a statement that they have no plans to cease operations.

One of the photo-based Facebook groups I'm a part of shared this tongue-in-cheek post:

Ha! But seriously, we'll all be watching what happens with Kodak...

Five April Photo Links

I haven't done a "news" post in a while... click each link in each story for all the details.

• 1: Kodak film will be alive in the cinema a bit longer. Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, NBC Universal, and Warner Bros announced that they will keep using Kodak film even as most studios go digital.

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• 2: The public recently got a look at the first photo book ever. It's called "Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions" from 1843 book by English botanist and photographer Anna Atkins. It's considered to be the first book ever to be illustrated exclusively with photographs (well, cyanotypes actually).

Direct link: https://youtu.be/ekUUuU7whe0

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• 3: Here's a great list of movies about photography that every photographer should see.

"One Hour Photo" was at the top of the list.

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• 4: Want to shoot a film only lit by candlelight? You are now able to rent a Zeiss f/0.7 lens - the largest aperture len ever seen in the history of photography.

In the 1960s, NASA commissioned Zeiss to make 10 of these lenses to use on the moon. In the end, 3 were bought by Stanley Kubrick and used in his 1975 film "Barry Lyndon" where he shot some scenes only lit by candles:

Short documentary on Kubrick’s use of this lens. Direct link: https://youtu.be/FmSDnPvslnA

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• 5: Photographer Troy Wayrynen caught a photo of a high school cross country runner snapping a selfie, and it won him first prize in the "Sports" category in this year’s "Best of Photojournalism" contest by the National Press Photographers Association.

Close-up of winning image.

Kodak's Secret Nuclear Reactor (not really)

This is making a bit of news in the "photo curiosities" world lately. I found out about it in a report by Yahoo:

How's this for a revelation: The Kodak Eastman Co. had a small nuclear research reactor in a little-known underground labyrinth at its Rochester, N.Y., facility.

And, although locked down and under tight security, it also contained 3½ pounds of highly enriched uranium, reports the the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester. The writer succinctly notes:

That's the material that nuclear bombs are made of. Terrorists covet it.

The imaging company, which has filed for bankruptcy, used the reactor to check chemicals and other materials for impurities, as well as for neutron radiography testing, the newspaper reported. The reactor, acquired by the company in 1974, was about the size of a refrigerator and kept in a 14- by 24-foot cement-lined cavity dug below a basement of one of its research buildings.

"This device presented no radiation risk to the public or employees," company spokesman Christopher Veronda told the newspaper. "Radiation from the operation was not detectable outside of the facility."

Kodak didn't necessarily mean to keep the reactor a secret, the newspaper reported. Rather, it was just never truly public knowledge.

Although it had been mentioned in research papers, Veronda told the newspaper, the company never made a public announcement about it. And he wasn't sure the company ever notified local police, fire or hazardous materials officials that it possessed the reactor.

The newspaper acknowledged it learned of the reactor when a Kodak employee mentioned it.

As for the uranium, it is no longer at the facility. It has been shipped to a federal facility in South Carolina, the newspaper reported.

Eastman Kodak Co.'s californium neutron flux multiplier, known as a CFX, which it acquired in 1974,
in a photo found among Nuclear Regulatory Commission findings.

For the Democrat and Chronicle's first report of this, click here.

The First Digital Camera

Great story of the first digital camera:

"We Had No Idea"

In December of 1975, after a year of piecing together a bunch of new technology in a back lab at the Elmgrove Plant in Rochester, we were ready to try it. “It” being a rather odd-looking collection of digital circuits that we desperately tried to convince ourselves was a portable camera. It had a lens that we took from a used parts bin from the Super 8 movie camera production line downstairs from our little lab on the second floor in Bldg 4. On the side of our portable contraption, we shoehorned in a portable digital cassette instrumentation recorder. Add to that 16 nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter application, several dozen digital and analog circuits all wired together on approximately half a dozen circuit boards, and you have our interpretation of what a portable all electronic still camera might look like.

Vintage 1975 portable all electronic still camera

It was a camera that didn’t use any film to capture still images - a camera that would capture images using a CCD imager and digitize the captured scene and store the digital info on a standard cassette. It took 23 seconds to record the digitized image to the cassette. The image was viewed by removing the cassette from the camera and placing it in a custom playback device. This playback device incorporated a cassette reader and a specially built frame store. This custom frame store received the data from the tape, interpolated the 100 captured lines to 400 lines, and generated a standard NTSC video signal, which was then sent to a television set.

The playback device and TV

There you have it. No film required to capture and no printing required to view your snapshots. That’s what we demonstrated to many internal Kodak audiences throughout 1976. In what has got to be one of the most insensitive choices of demonstration titles ever, we called it “Film-less Photography”. Talk about warming up your audience!

Side-by-side comparison – Hardcopy vs. Film-less Photography

After taking a few pictures of the attendees at the meeting and displaying them on the TV set in the room, the questions started coming. Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV? How would you store these images? What does an electronic photo album look like? When would this type of approach be available to the consumer? Although we attempted to address the last question by applying Moore’s law to our architecture (15 to 20 years to reach the consumer), we had no idea how to answer these or the many other challenges that were suggested by this approach. An internal report was written and a patent was granted on this concept in 1978 (US 4,131,919). I kept the prototype camera with me as I moved throughout the company over the last 30 years, mostly as a personal reminder of this most fun project. Outside of the patent, there was no public disclosure of our work until 2001.

The “we” in this narrative was largely the people of the Kodak Apparatus Division Research Laboratory in the mid 1970’s and, in particular, several enormously talented technicians - Rick Osiecki, Bob DeYager and Jim Schueckler. All were key to building the camera and playback system. I especially remember working with Jim for many hours in the lab bringing this concept to life. Finally, I remember my visionary supervisor, the late Gareth Lloyd, who supported this concept and helped enormously in its presentation to our internal world at Kodak. In thinking back on it, one could not have had a better environment in which to “be crazy.”

Many developments have happened between this early work and today. Personal computers, the Internet, wide bandwidth connections and personal desktop photographic printing are just a few of these. It is funny now to look back on this project and realize that we were not really thinking of this as the world’s first digital camera. We were looking at it as a distant possibility. Maybe a line from the technical report written at the time sums it up best:

“The camera described in this report represents a first attempt demonstrating a photographic system which may, with improvements in technology, substantially impact the way pictures will be taken in the future.”

But in reality, we had no idea...

Film = Excitement

Getting ready to start shooting a new project next week...

BTW, I'm on Instagram as stevestenzel.

Kodak To Stop Making Slide Film

Breaking news from Kodak's website:

Discontinuance Notice
March 1, 2012
Due to a steady decrease in sales and customer usage, Kodak is ceasing production of KODAK PROFESSIONAL ELITE Chrome Extra Color 100 Film. We estimate that, based on current sales pace, supplies of this film are expected to be available in the market for the next six to nine months; however, inventories may run out before then, depending on demand.

I believe that's it - I don't think Kodak is making ANY more slide film. I'd say "I'm sad..."

....if I still shot slide film.

Instead I'll say "I think we all saw that coming."

Kodachome Dies Today in Kansas

A small Kansas photo lab is the last to be processing Kodachrome, and their last roll will be processed today. Here's a paragraph from a NY Times article yesterday:

At the peak, there were about 25 labs worldwide that processed Kodachrome, but the last Kodak-run facility in the United States closed several years ago, then the one in Japan and then the one in Switzerland. Since then, all that was left has been Dwayne’s Photo. Last year, Kodak stopped producing the chemicals needed to develop the film, providing the business with enough to continue processing through the end of 2010. And last week, right on schedule, the lab opened up the last canister of blue dye.

This was my favorite photo in the NY Times Article:

Photo: Steve Hebert for The New York Times