Earlier this month I completed a package design for a music CD for Tina Bergmann. Titled “Retrospective,” the disc is a re-issue of selected tunes from the first two LP recordings by “Strings & Things,” which began as the Bergmann family band and went on to become the most fun and accomplished folk band in northern Ohio.

The disc was conceived as a tribute to Tina’s mother, Diana Bergmann, who established the band in 1980, and passed away at the young age of 61 in 2006.

The cover photograph is a still life that I created showing Diana’s banjo-ukulele next to a heart-shaped wreath. The rest of the photographs in the layout are vintage snapshots of the band members taken in the early eighties. We chose the “soft-spot” package from Oasis for it’s resemblance to the old LP album covers and because it afforded a six-panel layout without the need for a separate insert booklet.

The music on this disc is, of course, outstanding. For those of us who have been fans of Strings & Things since the early days, this will be a “must have” as most of us have long since retired our turntables and haven’t heard these recordings in many years. Anyone interested in traditional folk music will appreciate the energy and passion of the performance. The disc is available on Tina’s website at www.allroadsleadhome.com.

This is really old news, but I thought some might be interested in reading a review of the solo exhibit of my work that took place at Hiram College some time ago.

Polaroid’s recent announcement that the entire line of instant film products would be discontinued by the end of this year created a somewhat interesting chain of events that is rather telling of the relationship most businesses today have with their customers.

The day I wrote the original post on this subject, I ordered one box of Polaroid Type-55 positive/negative sheet film from the Polaroid online store. I had already learned through the grapevine that all the local retailers had sold out of all their inventory of Polaroid films within 24 hours of the announcement, so I didn’t even bother trying to find a box locally. The order process seemed to go smoothly, although the price was really steep. The total for one box of T-55 plus shipping came to over $92.00! I could have bought the same item a week earlier off the shelf at my local photo retailer for less than $60.00. The order page of the website showed a fairly large inventory available, so I thought I might as well get one last box of film at whatever price.

Several weeks elapsed after the order was placed and it finally occurred to me that I had not received the film, nor had I received any notice that it had been shipped. So I sent an e-mail inquiry to find out when I could expect to receive the film. After a few days, I received an e-mail response from Mr. Eduardo Rosales at Shoppolaroid.com. The complete text follows:

“I hate to inform you that your order, like many others, has been canceled due to inventory issues. We weren’t able to fulfill all of the orders that were placed. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at any time. Sorry about the inconvenience.”

So, it appears that there is demand in the market for Polaroid films after all. The fact is that, despite the reduced consumption by commercial photographers of Polaroid products across the board, it is entirely conceivable that certain films such as Type 55, Type 59, etc. could still be viable products, albeit at reduced volume from what Polaroid had been selling in years past. A few of these films occupy a unique place in the world of fine art imaging and can’t really be duplicated by “Photoshoping” images from a digital camera.

I believe that Polaroid has made a profit on every box of film they produced since the early nineteen fifties. Unfortunately that does not mean that the company as a whole has been profitable. They’ve lost tons of money on many other ventures having nothing to do with photography products, but that’s another story. It’s obvious here that Polaroid’s customers are far down the list of constituents that the company feels it needs to please in order to remain viable. The stockholders demand a double-digit return on their investment or they’ll sell their shares for whatever they can get and move the money elsewhere, ergo, the stockholder must be appeased.

So who gets hurt when a shareholder decides to dump their stock at a low price because they simply want to make more money than Polaroid currently returns to them? Does the company have to make up any difference between the selling price and the price the shareholder initially paid for the stock? NO! Does the new shareholder who buys the stock at the new, lower price loose anything? No. Does the company loose any operating revenue if a shareholder jumps ship and sells at a loss? No.

Only the remaining stockholders see a paper loss on the value of their holdings if the stock drops in price. Unfortunately, these days, some of the biggest shareholders are the CEO and other top officers and even board members who are paid, in large measure, based on the value of the stock, even more than on the profitability of the business. As we saw in the “tech bubble” of the nineties, many companies that made no profits and really had no tangible product to sell were paying their top officers millions each year based on the upward direction of their stock price—a price that was doomed to collapse once the public finally got wise to the fact that the entire business was a scam in the first place (can you spell Enron?).

It would be a great day if Polaroid would decide to spin off the instant film manufacturing into a subsidiary or an isolated division of the overall corporate empire. The company could then go off in whatever direction it wants, commercial real estate, sub-prime mortgages, consumer electronics, (it’s up to the elbows in all of these) etc., while the Instant Film Division could quietly continue to operate and generate some profits needed to offset some small portion of the losses generated by their other hair-brained schemes.

I recently produced the design and layout for a 40-page book of Polaroid emulsion transfer images titled Fluid Images, by Bruce Cline.

Dr. Bruce Cline is the chairman of the Photography Department at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland, Ohio. I have assisted him with a number of his recent projects including a series of giclée prints of his black and white photographs of Pere-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France and a series of giclée prints of black and white Holga images of the Mayan ruins near Tulum, Mexico.

The book of Polaroid emulsion transfer images is an oversize 12 x 12 page, hardcover edition which includes thirty images of architectural and urban landscape subjects. Printing and binding was done at PIKTO in Toronto, Canada.

The news continues to get worse. Polaroid has announced that, “Due to marketplace conditions, Polaroid has discontinued almost all of its instant analog hardware products. Polaroid has also made the difficult decision to cease manufacturing of instant film products in 2008.”

I’ve been using Polaroid Type 55 positive/negative sheet film for many years. There has never been anything quite like it on the market and I’ve particularly grown to enjoy working with it since I began making my own digital scans in the mid-nineties. Scanning a T-55 negative was the ultimate collision of the analogue and digital worlds. The film itself was actually Kodak Panatomic-X, which I also used in roll form for many years. But the Polaroid chemicals contained within the film packet gave it a different look than Panatomic-X developed in something like D-76 or, my favorite, Acufine. That, and the 20-second processing time made the experience of shooting a large-format portrait or landscape image a slow-paced, meditative experience that was ultimately rewarded by image quality that was and is unique.

According to the Polaroid web site, Type 55 will be available until some time in the 4th quarter of this year. The expiration date on the last batch of this film will be December, 2008.

Merrill-David, the last operational commercial color film lab in Cleveland, recently announced that they would no longer process E-6 color film since their processor has broken down. The recent retirement of the guy who kept this machine in working order, together with the ever diminishing volume of film coming from local commercial photographers has made it an easy decision on their part to just walk away from a business segment that has been on life-support for a few years now, with no hope of ever making a comeback. Who can blame them?

We’ve seen this coming for some time, as one commercial lab after another first raised their prices and then dropped film processing from their services altogether, as digital capture became the preferred, and for many, the only method of producing images. So where does this leave us who would like to continue shooting film for the foreseeable future?

A search of the Kodak website for processing labs that process E-6 AND black & white film AND who meet Q-Lab standards returned exactly SIX photolabs in the United States. I suppose removing the black&white processing from the search terms would increase the number significantly, but if you would like to form a relationship with a distant lab that can handle all of your processing needs, the pickings are slim.

If there is any good news in this, it would seem that as more and more local labs abandon the film processing segment of their business, it opens the door to anyone who wants to stay in the business by becoming a national niche marketer. I visited the web sites of several of the six labs that came up in my search and it seems that they are aware of this opportunity and have already begun to gear up to service customers nationwide. Prause Productions, in Rochester NY, is one that looks particularly promising. It is a family run business with a lot of expertise and has the advantage of being located close to Kodak. I’ll be sending them a few test rolls in a week or so. I’ll let you know how it comes out.