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...

Olympic Triathlon Photographer

Associated Press photographer David Goldman talks about the issues he needed to work through to photograph the Olympic triathlon and open water swims:

Direct link: youtu.be/YBz-uPDpUBs?si=INfAYqPUG_2wAP0Y

Rocket Launch Destroys Camera

I saw this image on the web and had to investigate:

It turns out the story is true, but not how I imagined it.

NASA photographer Bill Ingalls set up several remotely triggered cameras near the launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to capture a SpaceX launch. And he was successful:

Image from NASA / Bill Ingalls.

Ingalls went to pick up his cameras, and he had ones closer to the launch pad that were just fine. But one that was farther away and captured the previous image looked like this:

Image from NASA / Bill Ingalls.

No, it wasn't the blast of the rocket that burned this instantly (which is how I imagined it in my mind). Instead, the rocket launch sparked a brush fire (which is apparently not uncommon) and Ingalls camera fell victim. He said it had continued to take photos "until its demise," and shared one of the final images:

Image from NASA / Bill Ingalls.

Is that the lens hood melting down at the top of that image? Wild.

Photographer's Copyright Case with the Met

A lot of photographers have strong opinions about this. An old image by photographer Lawrence Marano was used in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and now 2 courts have ruled that the Met can use Marano's image without his consent.

The "Frankenstein" guitar used by Eddie Van Halen. Photo: Don Emmert / AFP via Getty Images.

Here's more on the issue from ArtNet:

A panel of judges has ruled in favor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a copyright case over the institution’s use of a photograph of Eddie Van Halen.

A 1982 concert image of Van Halen shot by Florida-based photographer Lawrence Marano was used by the museum in an online catalogue for the 2019 exhibition “Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock and Roll,” which featured the late musician’s famous “Frankenstein” guitar.

Marano sued the institution for copyright infringement that same year, arguing that he never granted permission for the photograph to be used.

In July 2020, the lawsuit was dismissed by a U.S. District judge who ruled that Marano and his attorney “failed to show why the Met’s use of [the image] is not protected by the fair use exception.” Because the museum employed the photograph for educational purposes, it did not violate copyright law, according to the judge.

Marano appealed the case, but last Friday, three judges in New York’s Second Circuit court upheld the previous ruling.

“Whereas Marano’s stated purpose in creating the photo was to show ‘what Van Halen looks like in performance,’ the Met exhibition highlights the unique design of the Frankenstein guitar and its significance in the development of rock n’ roll instruments,” the judges wrote in a five-page summary order.

They further decided that the Met’s use of the image could not “in any way impair any other market for commercial use of the photo, or diminish its value.”

“The Second Circuit’s decision in the Marano case is an important one recognizing that museums, as cultural institutions, have the freedom to use photographs that are historical artifacts to enrich their presentation of art objects to the public,” Linda Steinman, an attorney for the Met, said in a statement.

“The Metropolitan Museum of Art values the contributions of all artists, including photographers, and also appreciates that fair use is a key tool for the visual arts community.”

“The mission of the Met and all museums,” Steinman continued, “is to provide the public with access to art—and this important decision protects, indeed strengthens, this important societal role.”

Marano’s attorney did not respond to Artnet News’s request for comment.

In both decisions, the ruling judges looked to the 2006 Bill Graham Archives v. Dorling Kindersley Ltd., case for precedent, Courthouse News points out.

In that case, which had to do with the republication of decades-old concert posters in a coffee table book about the Grateful Dead, the Second Circuit court ruled that the publisher reprinted the posters as “recognizable representation” of the band’s concerts, saying the case fell under fair use doctrine.

There's a lot of gray area in here, but I would agree with the ruling in the end. The US Copyright Office defines "fair use" as "a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances. Section 107 of the Copyright Act provides the statutory framework for determining whether something is a fair use and identifies certain types of uses — such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research — as examples of activities that may qualify as fair use."

Here's the court's ruling for the July/Aug 2020 dismissal if you'd like to read their words.

My biggest issue is that after all of this, Marano's name still does not seem to appear next to his photo in the exhibition. You would think the Met could at least acknowledge that they are using his photo, but as of this moment, they don't seem to be doing that.

Bryant Lake Bowl Drone Video

You've all seen this. I know I'm late to the party. But I just HAD to make sure I shared this here, as it's fantastic.

Direct link: youtu.be/VgS54fqKxf0

This was posted on YouTube less than a week ago, and as of posting here, it has 1.2 million views there, as well as more on Facebook and Twitter. (As of 2 days ago, the Star Tribune was saying it already had a total of 2.8 million aggregate views. One of the original versions on Twitter has 6.8 million views as of today.)

This may be updated over time, but here's a link on the Bryant Lake Bowl website that shares some of the media attention that the video has recieved:

A drone video shot in a Minneapolis bowling alley was hailed as an instant classic. One Hollywood veteran said it “adds to the language and vocabulary of cinema.”

NEW YORK TIMES

KARE 11

FOX9

The VERGE

NEW YORK POST

PIONEER PRESS

GIZMONDO

BROBIBLE

DIGITALTRENDS

NEWS18

MSP MAGAZINE

INDY100

IRISH EXAMINER

BELFAST TELEGRAPH

GAMESPOT

BBC

I've been seeing it EVERYWHERE on social media:

"Guardians of the Galaxy” filmmaker James Gunn tweeted the clip to his 800,000+ followers, saying he wanted the filmmakers "to come with us to London later this year when we shoot Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3." And Elijah Wood commented "HOLY SHIT" in his retweet of the video to his nearly 1 million followers.

Nice work, Rally Studios! (Jay Christensen cinematographer, Anthony Jaska director)

Curtains Create Pinhole Camera

There are many instances of pinhole cameras being formed in darkened rooms to project the outside on a far wall. (Abelardo Morell has done work like this for example.) Two days ago, someone on Reddit shared what was happening with their curtains, and it was pretty fun:

That's the street below being projected sort of "accidentally" on his ceiling as a pinhole camera would do. Here's a video of the street below "moving" on his ceiling:

The curtains in my room create a "natural" pinhole camera that projects images of the street below onto my ceiling from r/woahdude

Click here to see it on Reddit if that embedded video doesn't work.

An Eight Year Long Exposure

Here's an excerpt from a press release from the University of Hertfordshire from last week:

A photograph thought to be the longest exposure image ever taken has been discovered inside a beer can at the University of Hertfordshire’s Bayfordbury Observatory.

The image was taken by Regina Valkenborgh, who began capturing it towards the end of her MA Fine Art degree at the University of Hertfordshire in 2012. It shows 2,953 arced trails of the sun, as it rose and fell between summer and winter over a period of eight years and one month. The dome of Bayfordbury’s oldest telescope is visible to the left of the photograph and the atmospheric gantry, built halfway through the exposure, can be seen from the centre to the right.

Click here to enlarge.

The previously "accepted" record for longest exposure was a Michael Wesely photo that was just over half as long: 4 years and 8 months.

Here's a bit more on Valkenborgh's record-breaking image from the Smithsonian Magazine.

And here's a video by Justin Quinnell showing how to make your own pinhole camera that can hold up for a long exposure:

Direct link: youtu.be/wtZOWEB_wcI


An example of a 6-month exposure from Quinnell.

In The News: Three Photography Links

Here are 3 recent photography-related links... just things I found interesting:

• ONE: Highest Resolution Photo of the Sun:

About a week ago, Miami astronomers released the highest resolution images of the sun that anyone has ever created. It shows "a surface that’s divided up into discrete, Texas-size cells, like cracked sections in the desert soil. You can see plasma oozing off the surface, rising high into the solar atmosphere before sinking back into darker lanes."

The surface of the sun in motion.

Here's a bit about the technology behind it:

To observe the sun, you can’t just build a telescope the old-fashioned way. DKIST boasts one of the world’s most complex solar-adaptive optics systems. It uses deformable mirrors to offset distortions caused by Earth’s atmosphere. The shape of the mirror adjusts 2,000 times per second. Staring at the sun also makes the telescope hot enough to melt metal. To cool it down, the DKIST team has to use a swimming pool of ice and 7.5 miles of pipe-distributed coolant.

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• TWO: Capa's "The Falling Soldier" Sold:

Late last year, Sotheby's Paris sold the famous photograph "The Falling Soldier" shot by Robert Capa, hailed "the most emblematic image of photojournalism." It sold for €75,000, or just under $100,000.

Taken in 1936, it captures the last moments of a Spanish Republican fighter, in a shocking and fascinating composition. Capa made this photograph while reporting in Spain. It became famous a year later, when it was published by Life magazine in large format. Since then, many have speculated (and many have "proved") that it was a set-up image.

One of Capa's famous quotes that I like to share with students is:

     "If your pictures aren't good enough, then you're not close enough."

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• THREE: New York Times' "The Year in Pictures" for 2019:

I always like to share this because it's an important curation of photographs. Check out the The Year in Pictures 2019 by the NY Times:

Fun Photo Links

It's been a while since I've done a "news" post, and although most of these aren't "news," I'm still using that tag. Here are 5 things I've recently found interesting in the photography world:

• 1: There's a new app called the KODAK Reel Film App that can tell you where to find movies being shown on film (not digital projection):

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• 2: A photographer/videographer recently discovered this AMAZING Nikon store in London. This is a 35 minute video, but parts of it are quite interesting, especially if you're a bit of a history buff:


Direct link: https://youtu.be/qlxcpD5-sGA

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• 3: I don't know how to feel about this one... Relonch is a service where you take photos, send them to Relonch, and they send back fixed up files. For $99/month, they fix up and send back SOME of the files you upload by 9 a.m. the next morning. (The example files they show seem vignette-heavy with high contrast.)

This video explains it a bit:


Direct link: https://vimeo.com/190791985

Photos of the camera that comes with the Relonch service:

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• 4: I know it's a few weeks into the new year already, but if you need a photo challenge for 2017, check out this "365 photo project" calendar:

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• 5: Finally, I shared this link a few weeks ago, but it's worth sharing again. Here's the New York Times "Year in Pictures" for 2016. Some amazing work in there. Lots of political stuff (if you're into that).

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.

Four February Photo Links

• 1: "Indulgd" recently showed 36 Realistically Colorized Historical Photos. The color images seem to make the past not seem that long ago.

Old Gold Country store, 1939


Washington D. C., 1921


Abraham Lincoln, 1865


Mark Twain, circa 1900

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• 2: Philip Gefter from The New York Times recently wrote an article called "With Cameras Optional, New Directions in Photography."

Here's a bit from the article:

The shift of focus from fact to fiction, and all the gradations in between, is perhaps the largest issue in the current soul-searching underway in photography circles. Questions swirl: Can the “captured” image (taken on the street — think of the documentary work of Henri Cartier-Bresson) maintain equal footing with the “constructed” image (made in the studio or on the computer, often with ideological intention)?

Museums, for their part, are debating whether photography should remain an autonomous medium or be incorporated into a mash-up of disciplines in contemporary art. And photography curators, too, are questioning the quality and validity of new practices, as the ever-morphing ubiquity of social media challenges the singularity of the photographic image.

“The biggest problem facing curators and historians of photography,” Mr. Bajac said, “is the overflow of images.”

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• 3: There's a new product on the market for cleaning your dSLR sensor that claims it "is used professionally by many service centers, including Leica’s." I just ordered the "Sensor Gel Stick," and I'll report back when I try it:

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• 4: Finally, for some fun, there's a website called Photographs Rendered in Play-Doh. It contains, well, you know...

The Butterfly Boy, New York 1949 by Jerome Liebling




Throwing Three Balls into the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts) by John Baldesseri

Negatives Frozen in Antarctica for 100 Years

A box of 22 exposed but unprocessed negatives were recently found in a block of ice in Antarctica. The Conservators of the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust were working to restore an old exploration hut, and they discovered the cellulose nitrate negatives. They believe the images were left there by Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Ross Sea Party, which became stranded on Ross Island when their ship blew out to sea during a blizzard in 1914.

The negatives were painstakingly processed, and the images turned out. They're far from perfect, but they showed scenes from an Antarctic exploration 100 years ago:

See the rest of the images in a little slideshow HERE.

Five Photo Links for Mid-September

• 1: National Geographic has a new website to highlight their great photography. This is what they say: "FOUND is a curated collection of photography from the National Geographic archives. In honor of our 125th anniversary, we are showcasing photographs that reveal cultures and moments of the past. Many of these photos have never been published and are rarely seen by the public."

Some images are beautiful, some are historical, and many are both. You could keep scrolling for days. There are some amazing photos in this collection, and many of them are for sale. Check it out here.

"The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge from Yerba Buena Island in 1936."


"Teenage girls in bathing suits and caps pose on a dock in Brandenburg, Germany, March 1928."


"Astronaut Neil Armstrong floats in his space suit in a pool of water in 1967."


"Scientists take samples to study radioactive discharges in the Susquehanna River in Maryland, March 1985."

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• 2: On the anniversary of 9/11 last week, Esquire online re-published an article (first published 10 years ago) about this horrific photo:

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• 3: Hasselblad just opened it's first retail store in Japan.

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• 4: An article from Forbes Magazine about one of my photography favorites: Joel Sternfeld.

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• 5: Two related posts (here and here) talk about the lost art of darkroom printing with some iconic celebrity portraits.

Dennis Stock's photos of James Dean


Thomas Hoekper's photo of Muhammad Ali


Bob Henriques' photo of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (with MLK Jr blurry in the foreground)


Dennis Stock's photo of Audrey Hepburn

p.s. If you're a local, the F-Stop Swap is happening this weekend in Brooklyn Park.