Category: The Biz

Printing Dye Transfer: costs

Posted on Posted in coursenotes, dye transfer, grammar of gimme, overnight notes, The Biz, the meta

from old notebook… circa 1986, the end of days for dye labs.

Making dyes wasn’t as expensive as you may have thought. By the 80s, it was on its last lap. The large labs knew; only the lollipops didn’t.

These pages are from a small lab, a lollipop. He was late to the game and hoping that he could save money by doing his own work. The prices are from his Kodak rep. The times are from him watching us make prints for him. He then figured whether it was worth it for us to continue making prints. He chose to do the work himself. He didn’t know that our costs were half of what he was being charged by Kodak.

timing for 1st and 2nd dye transfer prints. The cost notations are the clients estimated costs from his Kodak rep.

The catalog pages from Kodak… two of the declining years. Most commercial labs knew the end was coming. Not everyone had the same estimator, nor did they have an exit. Kodak had fewer items at much higher prices. In the end, during that last official call, most of the sales were for chemistry. The film was eventually scrapped by Kodak as unsold waste.

price at the end 1993
price sheet 1981

This was a lesson Efke wasn’t taught. They learned on their own: specialty markets require specail handling. Of the three rolls of matrix-film produced, they sold less than half of one of them. The largest buyer, other than the originating university, was a British lab that never went into production.

Kodak was pulling the plug much earlier:

in 1981, Kodak issued a notice that products were being dropped. This notice drew several calls to Kodak’s C-suite.

It also caused the larger (Monarch) labs to consider buying Kodak’s process, as a license or outright. That didn’t happen — lucky for them. Don’t know. Could the process have been maintained by user labs?

American West

Posted on Posted in lost horizon, on photographers, overnight notes, The Biz, the fora, Theory: figurative

when trivia becomes the reason for the gathering. Weekenders, devoted members of the Snobby Hobby discuss work turning to the meaningless, quickly.

It may not mean anything, yet it fills the time of those without much effort.

Let’s get to the work… they can’t. What they can say about their work is how it was done. Even after decades, the conversation is at how-to.

speaking from rumor. once heard becomes the word.

The why-for of considering their campfire stories. Do they propose a mode of looking without understanding who, what it excludes. What, the how and the who they condone (or condemn) matters, perhaps, even more as the world of profession recedes into the past. There are amateurs and then again others. The nature of a field mixed without common ground is my interest.

Richard Avedon

Baldwin and Avedon. Nothing Personal [ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/13/richard-avedon-and-james-baldwins-joint-examination-of-american-identity ] was my preferred book. Baldwin’s writing was my prompt. Many years later, I see Avedon as a masterful photographer. A maker of cliches rather than a perpetuator of them. His story is that of many commercial photographers, although he was able to move from the commerce to collection with help from the Amon Carter.

 Philip Gefter’s book, “What Becomes a Legend Most,” argues for Avedon’s place as one of the 20th century’s most consequential photographers.

Laura Wilson documented the project’s gestation and birth in her book “Avedon at Work: In the American West.” Published in 2003. She learned the most necessary “craft” of photography — dealing with the world. The following video at the Amon Carter hits several key points in her method.

Modernage

Founded by Ralph Baum in the 1950′s, New York’s Modernage Photographics pioneered many of the most advanced darkroom techniques in the last half of the 20th Century. A master photographer and technician, Baum was to champion the notion that the art of the photographic print was equally important to the creation of the photographic negative that served as its inspiration. Name Drop: Josef Cernovics; Michael J. Masucci 

1985 Amon Carter shows Avedon In the American West

Deborah Bright (spe exposure) publishes Mother Nature and Marlboro Men… about landscape photography and western spaces

Click to access Bright-Marlboro_LAndscape.pdf