If film users didn’t have enough troubles with the digital explosion making traditional cameras practically irrelevant, now they’re going to have to pay more to take pictures.

The world’s largest maker of photographic film, Eastman Kodak, said today that it’s going to hike prices on its consumer, professional and movie films to offset the high costs of raw materials such as silver. Consumer and professional film will be jacked up by as much as 17 percent while motion picture film could rise as much as five percent.

‘Over the past year, Kodak has been absorbing unrelenting increases in the costs of raw materials used to manufacture film, including silver and petrochemicals,’ the company said in a statement. ‘These pressures have reached a point where they can no longer be offset by Kodak’s ongoing productivity programs.’

Eastman Kodak announces film price hikes [BusinessWeek]

(Via Gizmodo.)

this a note-to-self to find out more about this type of process…

I hit a couple of thrift stores in San Diego today looking for cheap cameras. I found a Polaroid Square Shooter 2 in a nice leather case for $3.00 which I was pretty sure I could still get film for. After getting it home and putting some new batteries (AA not those hard to find, weird 3.5v ones with the 9v connectors), I was dismayed to discover the “electric eye” doesn’t seem to be working and the shutter isn’t opening: bummer. There were 2 other square shooters I spotted but I didn’t bother with them since I had already found one. Maybe I will go back and check those out before we leave.

So, I’ve been going a little crazy with the analog photography lately.

I like that flickr displays the EXIF metadata to let you know what kind of camera took that photo. Obviously pictures that are a scan of photo taken with a non-digital camera do not contain that information. so, i did a quick search on the cpan and found Image::MetaData::JPEG

after reading some docs and using Data::Dumper i was able to come up with this script that sets the make and model info. here is an example I took with my Kodak Jiffy Six-20. if you find this useful, let me know…

download exif_makemodel.pl

eBay is a dangerous place. Of the 7 cameras in this picture, 4 were procured via eBay.

via Digg:

This may be one of the oldest methods of photography, it uses a geranium leaf as the film which gets exposed to light and chemically treated to reveal the image.

read Why didn’t the Romans invent Photography?