Roger H -- you really live in Aquitaine? Can we call you Le prince d'Aquitaine? V. good wine about, I bet. Anyway such a beautiful place in the world: and such amazing light.

Dear Vince,

For a given value of Aquitaine, yes. Over the years the Aquitaine has varied enormously in size, and where I live is not currently included in it. The département is Vienne, but at the end of the village is the beginning of Deux-Sevres.

On the other hand, Thouars, 15 miles north, was the last city to fall to the French in the Hundred Years' War. I like to use the old name to point out that even nation-states such a France are surprisingly recent and may be surprisingly transient.

A lot of Acadiens came from this area, too.

Cheers,

R.

Unfortunately none of this matters at all to the bankruptcy judge or the creditors. This is a pure and simple financial decision.

Imagine YOU, not some ambiguous company, were owed money by Kodak. Imagine the bankruptcy court telling you that you got a smaller percentage of what was owed you than possible but you should be happy because photographers still had Tri-X.

I'm going to change my location to "Los Angeles, Mexico" instead of Los Angeles, California.

All you need is 'Alta California' to be as historically accurate as my version of the Aquitaine.

Cheers,

R.

True. My grandmother was the only one among her 7 siblings to be born Italian right after WWI. All others were born Austrian although they always spoke Italian.

http://www.bjp-online.com/british-jo...-film-business

Nothing specific yet but at least it's going forward. It's good to know that there are 'traditional photographic companies' amongst the interested parties but then there are also private equity firms...

Sounds like film is doing well. Good reason to get rid of it eh?

How twisted am I to think this is illogical?

All the more reason to support Ilford. They at least are fully committed to film.

Sure, once Ilford comes out with a nice color neg film I'll support them.

I think we need to face the fact that colour has become the realm of digital Jamie and colour film will probably fall by the wayside sooner or later. Black and white film has a definite superiority over digital to my eyes and I don't think digital can actually replace it now or in the near future.

And nothing I've seen from the Leica Monochrom makes me think otherwise!

That's an old tale that just doesn't ring true. To my eye digital bw looks much better than digital color. BW film doesn't have any more of a superiority over digital than color neg film does at least not in regards to aesthetic qualities. The simple reason why bw film might last longer is that it is easier to produce and there are a lot more niche companies making bw film than color.

YMMV as to whether it is easier to produce, but it is cheaper to make on a small scale - a colour casting has a much higher start-up cost and minimum volume, as it has thrice the number of critical layers.

Black and white does not need downsizing, it already is produced on art supply scale, having undergone the shrinking procedure decades ago - high volume black and white went away in the consumer market when it became more expensive than CN over the Hunt silver speculation in 1980, and vanished into an artistic niche when the dailies took to printing colour some five to ten years later.

But apart from all economic aspects, there are conceptual differences that do matter in the world of art. Black and white is a immediate physical action, light exposing silver, while colour, with its three filtered layers, couplers and bleaches is inherently mediated, an artefact of a man made process rather than of nature - evident in that we could assign very different filters or colours by a mere act of definition of the colour process. As such, black and white is on quite a different side of the (philosophical) fence than colour or digital.

Nah, black and white film was made because the technology at the time was just not up to the task of making color film. Nothing philosophical about it, just simple manufacturing.

Black and white is every bit as much of a 'man made process' as color film. It's just less complicated of a process. And I'd be very wary of philosophical distinctions based on differences in the way the chemical process works. In the real world (and in the art world) nobody cares about those differences simply because very few are even aware of them. What matters much more is the way people treat these different media and how that affects their perception of how an image comes to be. As such color film is definitely on the same side of the fence as bw.

I see your point but I shoot mono so my priorities are different.

Awesome, very awesome.

To celebrate, I think I'll shoot a few Tri-X rolls...

No doubt about the real world. In the art world, these distinctions do matter, though.

The distinction between film and digital certainly matters. The distinction between color and monochrome certainly matters. However, the differences in the chemical process between color and monochrome does not matter on a conceptual level. On a practical level, sure, but not on a conceptual one.