ondebanks wrote:
I know that Ashley Pomeroy is a member here, and his blog was very interesting to me in researching the DCS cameras.
One of his links takes you to an instance of DCS information in "Wayback Machine", an internet archiver.
I was amazed to find that I could use this to explore nearly all of Kodak's DCS webpages from 1994 onwards. There were several generations/styles of the website, more or less in line with generations of the cameras, the priorities of Kodak the entity, and the increasing sophistication of the web.
I was dead chuffed with my amateur sleuthing - I was going over and rewriting (e.g. slashing) my old blog post about the Kodak DCS 460, rewriting it into English instead of the bizarre contractionless universal-speak I was aiming for at the time, dear God what was I thinking? (pause) And I decided to look through Google Books to see if there were any old magazine articles about Kodak DCS cameras, and I think I found something in Popular Science, or Popular Mechanics, circa 1998 that made reference to Kodak's website. I typed the URL into the Wayback Machine, and presto, the above.
There's a bit about a chap called Marc Bryan-Brown who used a DCS 420 to photograph parts of Arctic Siberia, which must have been tricky, and it doesn't say anything about charging the thing up:
"There was no option of wet film processing. (There are no labs in Arctic Siberia.) And there was no question to me that to use the DCS 420 was the most efficient and effective way to get the images back to the states while we were on the expedition. We wanted the images to appear in a timely fashion so they were relevant news and not just old stories."
I assume he took a laptop and some kind of car charger that could work with Russian trucks. Or something. Sadly the article doesn't seem to have any samples, certainly not full-size ones, although there's a zoom into a DCS 460 shot:
http://web.archive.org/web/199612270125 ... otes.shtmlIt mentions the camera winning the 1995 Macuser Eddy away, although I can't find any record of this on the internet anywhere.
I then had a look for subsequent work by the photographers in question, but they've all moved on, understandably so given that fourteen years have passed. Bryan-Brown
does still have the same photo of Lenin in his portfolio:
http://web.archive.org/web/199612271931 ... enin.shtmlhttp://www.bryan-brown.com/site/lifesty ... Lenin.htmlBased on the borders it was shot on film, though. The site also has a profile of Gary Fong - doesn't seem to be the Gary Fong of cheap plastic tat fame, though, this appears to be a different, thinner Gary Fong. Some of the other Google books results were interesting, including one from Vibe magazine circa August 1997 which ends with:
"Digital cameras offer many great advantages over 35mm film and represent the future of photography - a flick through
Time,
Newsweek, and
Sports Illustrated will confirm this - but they won't completely replace the older technology. However antimodern, film allows shooters to connect with photography's tradition of craftsmanship in ways that slogging pixels around a screen cannot: rather like there are those who prefer the intimacy of a handwritten letter to the expediency of e-mail."
Which is a bit of a non-sequitur - digital photography created a whole new tradition of craftsmanship - but hey, it was 1997. I learn that a CCD is "a kind of digital sponge". The spooky thing for me is that, presumably, most of the photographs in that magazine were shot with film, and I can't imagine how hard that would have been; getting the exposure correct without any kind of digital aids, and then developing and scanning everything. It must have taken ages.
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