The Guardian a U.K. news service is reporting that Kodak is ending production of the 73 year old film. The film was introduced in 1935 and was used in the creation of Steve McCurry’s 1985 portrait of an Afghan girl with green eyes on National Geographic’s cover. As I learned from this article the film is hard to produce and even harder to develop as there is only one place in the country (USA) that can develop it Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas. The film constituted less than 1% of sales at Kodak and the clear choice for all photographers professional or amateur alike is digital capture as 70% of Kodak’s revenue is from the consumer and commercial digital business.

Both the Paul Simon song and the film itself remind me of my father and his love for photography, which has had a profound impact in my career. Thanks Dad. Thanks Kodak.

The Article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jun/23/kodachrome-colour-film-ph...

Last night I attended a metadata educational event. It was sponsored primarily by the SAA stock artist alliance. The presenters/photographers went through the 5 w’s of metadata and it was well worth the trip to S.F. Here is the website for this tour http://www.photometadata.org. The photographer next to me and I started to talk about watermarking images for copyright protection on the internet. She said she found it important to her, but to place one on each image before it gets posted to the web can be daunting. I couldn't agree more! I told her of a Photoshop Action to save time, and just found it again online- http://psnick.deviantart.com/art/Watermark-Photoshop-Action-78686819

In my opinion we (photographers) only have so much time in a day and we need to adjust to the current conditions/trends of the web & where we can spend our time most effectively. In the overall scheme of scheming photos online I see two problems with the ROI (return on investment) for watermarking. First, my clients/potential clients want to see my/their image and it is hard for many clients to get the full effect when my name is written lightly across the image- lost sale? If you place it in a corner you might as well not place it on the picture at all because if someone wants to ‘clone’ it out chances are the patterns will be easier to handle at that locale on the photograph. Second, if someone really wants your image watermarked or not they’ll take it anyway. After last night,s event my on-image piracy prevention time is going to be spent exercising a solid metadata workflow process that not only fights piracy but leads to Sales.