Losing the eye...
Topic: Light and Shadow
Losing the eye...
A dreary cloudy day in the Hollywood Hills, when nothing catches your eye. There's just visual clutter.
You just need to rest your eye on where the clutter isn't.
Off the beaten path...
Topic: Insider Stuff
Off the beaten path…
Back in Rochester New York, the home of the Kodak Corporation, where the modern photographic industry was born, we used to joke that the movie industry ended up in southern California because, with all the sunshine, it's the world's largest soundstage, while the actual film industry stayed in Rochester, as it was the world's largest darkroom. Yes, it's often a dreary place.
When you're in Rochester you can visit the Eastman House. It's pretty cool. Out here, Eastman Kodak, the world's largest maker of photographic film, has always been a part of Hollywood. Of course the new home of the Oscars is the Kodak Theater at Hollywood and Highland. That's for the tourists. Where the real work is done is at Eastman Kodak's Hollywood campus down on Santa Monica Boulevard, where they have just under four hundred people who supply the movie industry with that they need. It's not on any Hollywood tour.
Here's how it looked April 14, 2006 - one of the rare rainy days in Los Angeles, when Hollywood looked a lot like Rochester.
Note, when George Eastman got fed up with dry-plate photography his solution was to coat paper with a layer of plain, soluble gelatin, and then with a layer of insoluble light-sensitive gelatin. After exposure and development, the gelatin bearing the image was stripped from the paper, transferred to a sheet of clear gelatin, and varnished with collodion - a cellulose solution that forms a tough, flexible film. So that was that. Then he worked out transparent roll film and the roll holder, and folks out here were in business.
This photograph was taken with a digital camera - no film involved at all. No wonder the Kodak folks aren't doing that well these days.
