Everybody's Gone Surfin'

Photo by Loomis Dean, 1950.  Click image for larger.

Snow Geese on Cayuga Lake

Snow Geese at Rocky Dock on Cayuga Lake.  Our photographer reports the visiting fowl are "as loud as a freight train."  Click photo for larger view.

Helen Mirren, 1969

Photo by Neil Libbert.

Worth the $1.50

September in the Finger Lakes

Sunday afternoon.  Click pic for larger image.

Our film is out of date

Sippican Cottage:

I have almost no pictures of my work from back then. I tell my children that you used to have to buy a reel of plastic film covered with metallic goo and keep it hermetically sealed in an expensive camera, and when you were done with 24 pictures or so, you'd take them out and drive to a store and leave them with a clerk and then go back a week later after they were done drizzling them with strange chemicals and printing them on shiny pieces of paper. They were all completely white or completely black, generally, when you finally got a look at them.

I tell them, but they figure I'm pulling their leg.

The place has a good view

Looking out a living room window, northern Virginia.

Republicans

Ann Romney with Kid Rock, Detroit, February 27.

Kodak makes its last camera

Rochester's Eastman Kodak Company introduced its first daylight loading camera in 1891.  Today, Upstate New York's former industrial giant, now bankrupt, announced that it will end camera production.

For generations of New York politicians and business "leaders," who've told us the solution to our economic collapse is more of the same, then more of the same, then even billions more of the same, we'd hope Kodak's historic collapse will ring a bell.  At least, take Kodak's name off the list of  politically connected crony corporations we're supposed to follow into the promised land.

Opie gets a Kodak

Guess who?

 

Martha Stewart, 1961

Kodak introduces digital photography..

The future was in their hands

...in 1995.  In this photo, Kodak staffers demonstrate digital photography at a press conference in San Francisco on March 28 of that year.  The basic technology behind digital photography was developed at Kodak in 1975.

Kodak had a fast break opportunity with digital imaging, but threw the ball away. Check out the rise and fall of the Big Yellow Box at ExtremeTech.

Kodak: world's first digital SLR, 1991

Kodak bankrupt

Eastman Kodak Company has finally pulled the trigger.

"After considering the advantages of Chapter 11 at this time, the board of directors and the entire senior management team unanimously believe that this is a necessary step and the right thing to do for the future of Kodak," CEO Antonio M. Perez said in announcing the decision.

The filing listed assets of $5.1 billion and debts of $6.75 billion...

As of a year ago, Kodak had 7,100 employees in the Rochester area and 18,800 companywide. The worldwide figure is now 17,000, the company said in its bankruptcy papers, about 8,000 of them in the U.S. It did not give a new Rochester-area figure.

At its peak in the early 1980s, the company employed 62,000 people in Rochester and 130,000 worldwide.

Under Perez's enlightened stewardship, Kodak's stock price dropped from $25/share to bupkes.  One would assume Mr. Perez had his hands full getting ready for a big garage sale at Kodak Park, but the Spanish-born business genius still has enough free time to serve on something called "President Barack Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness."

Kodak's last new cameras?

Despite teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, Rochester's Eastman Kodak Company introduced two new cameras today - perhaps its last.

Two new Kodak cameras were announced today, both of which are priced below the $200 mark: the Wi-Fi-enabled Kodak EasyShare M750, which allows users to upload photos directly from the camera and pair up with smartphones via a peer-to-peer connection, and the Playfull Dual hybrid still/video camera, which has some of the best specs we've seen in a pocket camcorder.

Best magazine cover ever

December, 1979.  Photo by Annie Leibowitz.

December 7, 1941

Japan made a big mistake, seventy years ago today. 

UPI has photos.

An Upstate Pearl Harbor survivor is known as "the man who saved the West Virginia." 

Pearl Harbor Anniversary Update:

The President of the United States' official schedule for today: 

2:15 pm

The President holds a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Harper of Canada

Oval Office

3:00 pm

The President and Prime Minister Harper of Canada deliver statements

South Court Auditorium

4:35 pm

The President attends a campaign event

DC, The Jefferson Hotel, Washington

Last exit for the "Big Yellow Box?"

Rochester's Eastman Kodak may be all done, folks.

Eastman Kodak Co. (EK), the unprofitable 131-year-old camera maker, is weighing options including a bankruptcy filing because of concerns raised by possible buyers of its patent portfolio, said three people with direct knowledge of the process.

Sam Henry looks at a sad day for Rochester, Upstate New York, and everyone who ever captured images on film.

This is a company whose “campus”once  covered a large portion of this city and whose wealth enabled Rochester to print its own money or script during the Great Depression and to carry on fairly unscathed.  So many in the community were touched by Kodak that you heard it said “the big yellow box takes care of us.”  And it did.

Sunny Manitoba

The Guess Who, Bannatyne Avenue, Winnipeg, 1971.  From Wikipedia:

The album covers and the title track illustrate a transition in band member Kurt Winter's life.

Bannatyne Avenue is located in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the home city of The Guess Who. The front of the album cover for the vinyl LP has the words "So Long, Bannatyne" above a red Chevy with a Manitoba license plate. In the background there is a building labeled "Bannatyne Apartments". On the back of the album cover is the red Chevy again, but in a residential neighbourhood. The song lyrics include the line:

So long Bannatyne, hello my Chevrier home.

For bonus points: what's the purpose of the wire hanging out of the Chevy's grill? 
Hint: Manitoba.

July in the Finger Lakes

Elizabeth Taylor, RIP

Elizabeth Taylor passed away today in Los Angeles at 79.  She appeared in over fifty films and won two Academy Awards for Best Actress.

More photos at the Daily Mail.

Rosie the Riveter, RIP

Geraldine Hoff Doyle, a World War II factory worker whose bandana-wearing image in a wire-service photo is said to have been the model for the woman depicted in the 1942 "We Can Do It!" poster, has died. She was 86. The iconic wartime poster became an enduring symbol of women's power from the Rosie the Riveter era

James Lileks posts the story at Right Network.  Don't miss the portrait of Geraldine at age 17.