Kodak Kills Kodachrome

Film fades and soon Kodachrome will fade from the scene forever. Yes, I am afraid, mama is goin' take your Kodachrome away. Kodak has announced the end of an era; Kodachrome film is being discontinued. By the end of 2010 the last plant processing this unique film will shut down, the film itself will be gone in months.

Its had a good run — 74 years in production. Today Kodachrome sales are only a fraction of one percent of Kodak's total film sales. For most consumers, amateur and professional, the disappearance of Kodachrome is a non-event. Digital technology dominates the market with the majority of photographers preferring digital to film.

Many will tell you that Kodachrome was the first commercially successful colour film. They have a case. But, since Kodachrome's release back in the mid '30s, there have been major advances in film technology. Chromes will still be available, they just may be better, certainly different, and no longer Kodachrome.

Steve McCurry, the National Geographic/Magnum photojournalist who shot the famous Afghan Girl June 1985 cover had this to say, "While Kodachrome film was very good to me, I have since moved on to other films and digital to create my images. In fact, when I returned to shoot the 'Afghan Girl' 17 years later, I used Kodak's E100VS film to create that image, rather than Kodachrome film as with the original."

McCurry, even though he has been an unfaithful Kodachrome lover, has been chosen by Kodak to be the photographer to shoot the last roll of Kodachrome — 36 frames — with the images to go to the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film.

The main difference between Kodachrome and other slide, or transparency films, is that the dye couplers, the colours so to speak, are embedded in the other film emulsions themselves — not so with Kodachrome. Processing Kodachrome was complicated, expensive, and environmentally challenging. For decades the film could only be processed in Kodak's own labs.

There are those like William Wolfe-Wylie of Sun Media who claim, "The image quality and resolution of a film like Kodachrome still can't be touched (by digital cameras)." As a photojournalist who entered the business shooting chromes and left it shooting digital, I can assure you that digital resolution surpassed film years ago, if by resolution you mean apparent sharpness and measurable detail.

The almost total lack of noise when digital images are exposed at low ISO settings contributes greatly to the perceived clarity of the digital image over film which is inherently noisy or grainy. (But oddly enough, it is in low-light-level situations where digital really shines — basketball in dark, high school gyms, rock performances on underlit stages, soccer games or baseball games under the lights . . . )

Film lovers, and film does have a small but strong following, will argue that digital can never replace film. Well, for many of us it has, but for those still in love with film there are newer, and quite possibly better films still being made. Admittedly, these films will not be Kodachrome. It was unique.

Good-bye Kodachrome. Thanks for the memories.

• For a more detailed overview, visit the ars technica site.
• Kodak has a slide show of 43 famous Kodachrome images. Check it out.
• Or visit Steve McCurry's site. Warning: can be slow to load.

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This image has very little to do with the above and yet it has everything. I needed a place to put this image, on-line, so that I would have an Internet address. I needed the address in order to post the image to Canadian Geographic. Shot with a simple digital point and shoot, this picture makes the advancements in photography since the invention of Kodachrome very clear.

The Great A&P forgot what made it great.

The A&P sign came down today at our neighbourhood strip mall. Soon the Metro sign will go up. It seems like an excellent time to republish a post looking at the rise and fall of A&P, once the world's food distribution giant.


While cleaning the garage today I uncovered a dusty, forgotten, cardboard box filled with ancient copies of the Reader's Digest. The February 1948 issue had an article, condensed from Fortune, entitled "The Great A&P."

In 1948 the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company was the biggest single buyer, distributor and seller in the world of all but a few food products. A&P accounted for ten percent of the total food store sales in the United States with sales of two billion dollars, just about equal to the combined totals of their five biggest competitors.

Back then A&P owned two huge laundries for keeping their many uniforms clean. They used so many labels, they owned their own printing plant. A&P had their own Alaskan fishing fleet enabling them to deliver, for the first time, vast quantities of fresh and frozen seafood deep into the American Midwest.

A&P operated 37 bakeries in the U.S. and two in Canada. They baked more cakes and fried more doughnuts than anyone else – nearly 2,000,000 a day. And A&P was no slouch when it came to bread either; They baked 1,000,000 loaves a day.

According to the Digest, despite the massive amount of baked goods produced, A&P made allowances for regional preferences: bitter-chocolate icings east of the Mississippi, sweet chocolate west; mostly white bread in the west, 25 different varieties in the east.

Eggs were candled, graded and quickly sold at the peak of freshness. The east got medium-light yolks while those in the west were a deeper colour. Bostonians got premium brownshelled eggs while New Yorkers got the white eggs they demanded.

Attacked under the antitrust laws in the States, even its detractors conceded that A&P's savings on mass buying and inhouse production were being passed on to consumers.

In the early '30s the number of A&P stores peaked at about 16,000 and then the slow decline set in. In the '60s A&P retreated from the west coast, selling their stores to Safeway. In the '90s the shrivelling giant pulled out of Alabama, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. Today, thanks to "Fresh Thinking Since 1859", A&P operated about 460 stores.

By 2007, A&P, the chain that once bragged that it had an approach to business that "made deserts bloom" had dropped about 21 notches in food store standings and its days of dominance in the food industry were long gone. The few remaining stores were now all centred in the American northeast.

The article ended by saying A&P, the great discounter, was firmly attached to "the one great principle – the selling of more for less..."

I was but an unsteady toddler when the Digest article was written. Today, I am a retired geezer with a fading memory, but A&P’s memory faded long before mine. In 2005 Metro Inc., the successful Quebec food retailer, acquired A&P Canada. Soon all Canadian stores will be rebadged with the Metro name.

Ironically, ten years before their sale to Metro, A&P Canada opened, with great fanfare, its first discount food store, Food Basics, designed to attract customers by offering better value and lower prices.

A&P lost its way, forgetting that it, The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, was the original discount food store dedicated to the "the one great principle – the selling of more for less . . . "

Downtown London (Ont.) Master Plan Session

I'm both impressed and wordless.

I attended the Downtown Master Plan and Public Information and Visioning Session last night, Wednesday, July 29. It was held at Museum London and was well attended, every table rimmed with attendees and more people filling chairs or standing at the back of the room.

I have no time to make any thoughtful comments and so I will simply stay quiet. There will be another public meeting, this one revealing the completed work, to be held in September. The city has posted information on the Downtown Master Plan Study. Blogger Brian Frank has posted a personal view of the night from the perspective of someone who works and lives downtown.

Hope to have a more substantive post before the next meeting,
If not, maybe we'll see you at the next gathering,
Cheers,
Rockinon

Hey Americans! Canadian Health Care Rocks!

I watch a lot of television news and I confess a lot of it is American. I follow the whole Obama health care reform controversy with a smile. I live in Canada.

A little over five years ago the mitral valve in my heart failed. I was sitting at my computer and noticed my heart beating quicker than usual. I don't usually feel my heart pounding but that day I did. I called work and they insisted I go to emergency.

I went to the walk-in clinic near our home and not emerg. A doctor at the clinic listened to my heart and said that there was a definite problem. He wanted to call an ambulance and rush me to emerg. I refused. He said that I may have had a heart attack. I assured him that I hadn't. My dad had a heart condition. I know heart attacks. I did not have a heart attack.

They called my wife and she came to the clinic, picked me up and drove me to the hospital. At emerg they took some blood and soon knew I had not had a heart attack. This was the good news. The bad news was that the hospital doctors all agreed something, possibly a valve, was wrong in my heart. They booked me into the cardiac institute for tests.

Within days I was taking a stress test. I failed.

I was booked into one of the local hospitals for an angiogram. The doctor threads a tube from your crotch up to your heart — I always knew my crotch was directly connected to my heart. The doctor injects a dye and watches how it behaves. A goodly amount of blood backed up and swirled about aimlessly with each heart beat. The doctor had confirmation; my mitral valve leaked "like a sieve."

At the time I was in my late fifties but I had the body of an eighteen-year-old, hey this is my story, and so the doctors hinted that I might be a good prospect for undergoing the first robotic repair of a mitral valve in Canada. Ah, payback for all those years of jogging.

My valve was repaired by Dr. Alan Menkis at the controls of a da Vinci surgical robot. The incision was only a few inches long and the scar is hidden in a chest muscle crease under my right nipple. No split breast bone. No huge scar. And I'm healthy. My valve itself was surgically repaired. No pig valve, no mechanical valve, no life-long drug regimen.

And the cost? It was covered by OHIP, the Ontario Health Insurance Plan, the government medical plan.

I could tell you more stories. I could tell you about my fifty-year-old nephew and how he was diagnosed with testicular cancer in his teens. OHIP took care of his treatment. He wasn't my sister's only child to need expensive and very sophisticated medial treatment. Another child required delicate brain surgery. Both boys were treated successfully and my sister and her husband were not left financially strapped. OHIP covered all.

I could tell even more stories but let's be honest, when I am done you might simply reply, "Well, we heard of a Canadian who...," fill in the blank space with some medical horror story. The problem is that my stories and yours are simply anecdotes. Newspapers and television love 'em; they put a human face to a complex problem. But anecdotal stories are not the whole story, for that we must look to numbers.

According to the latest figures that I could find that the United States spends 1.5 times more money on health care as expressed as a percent of GDP than Canada. I understand that Americans are living longer than ever, but not as long as people in dozens of other countries, including Canada. But, we can even argue about these numbers. Even if they are accurate, what do they actually represent?

A recent poll by CTV in Canada reported that "fifty-five percent of Canadians thought the health care system should be more public, only 12 per cent thought it should be private, and the rest thought Canada had struck the right balance between the two options."

It is all too confusing. All I know is that I am 62, and my heart is still beating thanks to Dr. Menkis, da Vinci and OHIP. I'm happy to be a Canadian.

Addendum: I did a Google search of the Internet and discovered that a lot of brilliant medical stuff developed in the U.S. is used for the first time outside of the States. It is not unheard of for Canada, France or Great Britain to take U.S. medical creativity and use it to chalk up medical firsts.

As for the treatment of older folk, my wife's uncle got a new hip when he was in his eighties and his wife, also in her eighties, got a new knee. She is now in her nineties and looking at having her other knee replaced. OHIP, the government plan, picks up all costs and there is no dispute over age.

Newspapers, not such smarties

When considering a name for this blog, I thought of calling it "Rockinon: Musings." In some ways, it was a better name as I write about stuff I think about, like newspapers. I like newspapers. I read them. I worked for two of them. And now, I muse over them.

When I worked at newspapers, I just grumbled, mostly quietly—now, I blog. I get to grumble openly, loudly, and often. I've been surprised to discover that journalists don't like public grumbling. I get what I would call public-hate-mail for my innocuous observations. And now to today's small grumble. I'm sure some journalists' will soon have their knickers in a knot over this. All too weird.

Paul Berton, editor-in-chief of The London Free Press, claimed, "Newspapers may be increasingly late to breaking news parties, but they have the advantage of getting more (if not all) the facts right." I'm sorry to tell you Paul, you're late to many stories and often wrong.

The London Free Press can't even get a story about the changes in Smarties right. I blogged about this problem of inaccuracy before here and again here. Paul, the columns you write for the paper are all too often error-filled. You, like your staff, are spread too thin. My guess is that the paper cannot spare an editor to edit your column and we both know how important that second pair of eyes can be.

It has been more than four months since Nestlé changed Smarties. Nestlé no longer uses artificial colouring. Their website states the improved candy was "available starting in March 2009." The London Free Press broke the news today, the end of July, in their "monday minute" column. The Free Press, in keeping with the fun nature of the column, doesn't capitalize the "M" on Monday.

I hope the reader is having fun because I know The London Free Press staff isn't. They are stretched so ridiculously thin, as are all the staff at all the Sun Media/Quebecor Media papers, that they simply repackage a bit of stale fluff and report almost word for word the company's press-kit claims. This plagiarism is bad writing and bad journalism. Both the paper and the press release talk about "the trend to healthier lifestyles" driving the change.

Sadly, there is actually a bit of a story here, but even months late to the party The London Free Press had no time to discover the story. Tell me again, why we need big media—like Quebecor with their big layoffs resulting in thin staffs unable to perform.

So, what was the story missed by The London Free Press? Answer: Some colours have gone missing! Temporarily there are no blue nor green Smarties. Nestlé states on their website, "It’s proving very difficult to find a non-artificial blue." This eliminates both blue and green Smarties from the line-up as green results from a mix of blue and yellow.

The other missed story is the claim about Smarties being part of a trend toward a healthier lifestyle. Smarties? Give me a break. Nestlé itself states, "Save sweet and fatty treats for special occasions." When it comes to kids and lunch box ideas, even Nestlé nixes Smarties.

You can get 22% of your daily fat from a box of Smarties.

My mother, back in the '50s, understood what is truly meant by a healthier lifestyle. She gave me apples, navel oranges and even carrot sticks.

By the way, I don't get my knickers all in a knot over serving a child a few—very few—Smarties. But, a few go a long way. They are not my idea of a healthier lifestyle.

Cheers,
Rockinon

Who will shed a tear for the beaver?

A few years ago I wrote a weekly column for The London Free Press. In the course of writing the column I came across the story of how the Canadian beaver, or to be accurate the American Beaver (Castor canadenis), was introduced to the tip of South America, the Tierra del Fuego archipelago.

Walking along the Thames River below the presently kaput Springbank Dam I noticed downed trees, their stumps bearing the distinctive teeth marks of the Canada's largest rodent and smallest lumberjack — the beaver.

If you like wetlands, beavers are environmental engineers. If you like the world just the way it is and want to keep it that way, beavers are environmental vandals.

Argentina and Chile share the beaver infested archipelago at the tip of South American. The beaver were introduced in the 1940s by fur traders eager to start a beaver pelt industry. Beaver fell out of fashion, beaver fur coats are no longer in, and the beavers were left to tinker away at their two most popular pastimes — dam building and family building, not necessarily in that order.

Chile and Argentina don't always agree but when it comes to the beavers they both see them as vandals. Forests, decades old and ripe for lumbering, are being wiped out, drowned by beaver ponds and not downed by South American lumberjacks for profit.

Hated and despised our beavers are caught in the swirling currents of angry lies being spread to support their eradication from their adopted homeland. Our beloved beaver is being compared to the plague of rabbits destroying Australia or the crayfish infestation laying waste to the Nile River in Egypt. It just can't be true, can it?

Take the Egyptian crayfish, known as the cockroach of the Nile, they have their defenders. The abundant crustaceans eat the Nile River snail known to carry bilharzia, a water-born disease affecting millions of Egyptians. Deaths from bilharzia have decreased in recent years along the river where the crayfish are most common .

If you have ever been to New Orleans, you know that the little crustaceans are good to eat — a Cajun delicacy. Boiling them in water spiked with Louisiana hot sauce, gives their white, sweet meat a gentle spicy heat. Six of the little tails, they're similar to lobster tails but smaller, leaves the mouth warm and longing for a cool, heat-quenching beer. We must teach the Egyptians to eat crayfish, and to drink beer. In the end, they'll thank us for both.

And those rabbits in Australia, well there are very few people who have a good word for those bunnies, millions and millions of bunnies to be accurate. Even the fence builders, who benefited so greatly in the past from the building and maintaining of thousands of miles of rabbit-proof fencing criss-crossing Australia, had nary a good word for the varmints.

It's ironic that the pack animal credited with making the building and maintaining of the thousand mile fences possible was the camel — another species foreign to Australia, and like the rabbit introduced in error.

So, what of our beavers, are the South Americans enjoying hidden benefits? Or, are they just plain bad news, like the rabbits in Australia — or the rabbits in our tulip garden, according to my wife.

She assures me the little rabbits that frequent our backyard are the reason her tulip beds are so sparse. Singing quietly to themselves, "When you eat the tulips do you eat the red ones first?" they wipe out her spring-welcoming flowers — red ones first. Honest!

I hate to admit it but our beavers are building an environmental disaster in South America. The best I can say is that contrary to the belief the beavers having no natural predators at the tip of South America, some are claiming the crocodiles (should we say caiman) of the region are benefiting from our national rodent and have the beaver on their menu.

The beaver, in cutting down trees and large shrubs, in damming the region's wild streams, causes large ponds to form, providing habitat for fish and crocodiles. The Argentinian national park in Tierra del Fuego may have more beaver than in the past, of course in the past it had none, but it also may have a few more crocodiles with the beaver-induced expanding crocodile habitat.

If the beaver is successfully eradicated from the tip of South America, and that is the plan, at least the crocodiles will shed a tear.


Cheers,
Rockinon

Home Concert Featured The Laws

I'd never heard of home concerts. Friday night my wife and I attended one at the home of Christine Newland and her husband Walter Bietberger. Christine is the principal cellist for Orchestra London in London, Ontario. They are a cool couple and I'm not surprised that these two brought live music into their home and shared the experience with friends.

Christine and Walter's home concert featured The Laws, the husband-and-wife singer/songwriter team of John and Michele Law from Wheatley, Ontario. Their appearance, along with that of Nashville guitarist Brent Moyer, was not a one-off, unique event; no, it was part of a movement which is opening new venues to performers. One musician remarked Friday night, home concerts beat playin' bars.

There is a Canadian website, from the east coast, dedicated to home concerts — Acoustic Roof — but this is not simply a folksy Maritimes' movement moving west. I found references to home concerts being held everywhere from Arkansas, in the southern States, to various towns throughout Canada.

The Laws have performed on stages throughout North Amercia and have completed three music tours of Australia. They have been featured on Entertainment Tonight Canada and the PBS series Legends and Lyrics. The PBS site compares The Laws "to some of the greatest duos of all time... The Everly Brothers, The Louvins and Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons."

In the words of host Christine Newland, it was "an incredibly magical evening."

And now, listen to The Laws . . . and if you only have time for one, my choice is Away about Michele sleeping in her husband's shirt when he is away. My wife smiled when Michele talked about the obvious inspiration for the song. My wife liked to iron my shirts when I was away on an out-of-town assignment, or simply working the night shift.




Visit Reverb Nation for more of the music of The Laws and to purchase. Enjoy.











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