Visit to Eastman-Kodak Museum

[Destin]

I’m ashamed to admit that I live 40 minutes from the Eastman-Kodak museum that is located on the former estate of George Eastman in Rochester, NY and until this week I had never been. Absolutely incredible and well worth the trip.. if any of you are ever in the area I’d be glad to take you there for an excuse to go back.

Definitely going to go back in better light and weather to photograph the outside of the estate.

Here are a few photos from the vintage camera exhibit:

 

[IanG]

It's a great museum, I travelled rather a lot further and it was far better than I'd expected. I don't really remember looking at cameras though, I think I was more interested in the great images on the walls

Ian

 

[vintagesnaps]

That's be a cool place to visit. There's a Leica display at a local college in my area, I could just stand there and drool on the glass. If I ever went to the Eastman House I might not want to leave!

 

[Destin]

It's a great museum, I travelled rather a lot further and it was far better than I'd expected. I don't really remember looking at cameras though, I think I was more interested in the great images on the walls

Ian

There were only a few small exhibits of photos. Much of the museum is taken up with Bollywood posters right now for a special exhibit they’re doing. The house was pretty incredible too.

 

[dxqcanada]

What !!! I could have had a monochrome digital back for my Canon F-1

 

[Destin]

What !!! I could have had a monochrome digital back for my Canon F-1

And a WHOLE ENTIRE MEGAPIXEL

 

[Derrel]

I test shot the Kodak 14n back in the day....WOW!!! It had sooooo much more resolution than my then-current cameras which were a Nikon D1 (2.7 Megapixel APS-C) and a D1h. The files were rich in detail, but there were some image artifact issues with that camera back then, and processing the raw data was much trickier than it is today,and computers were slower and less-capable than they are today.

 

[Destin]

I test shot the Kodak 14n back in the day....WOW!!! It had sooooo much more resolution than my then-current cameras which were a Nikon D1 (2.7 Megapixel APS-C) and a D1h. The files were rich in detail, but there were some image artifact issues with that camera back then, and processing the raw data was much trickier than it is today,and computers were slower and less-capable than they are today.

I wish I would have been around for that era of photography. The transition to digital had to be fascinating.

 

[Derrel]

I test shot the Kodak 14n back in the day....WOW!!! It had sooooo much more resolution than my then-current cameras which were a Nikon D1 (2.7 Megapixel APS-C) and a D1h. The files were rich in detail, but there were some image artifact issues with that camera back then, and processing the raw data was much trickier than it is today,and computers were slower and less-capable than they are today.

I wish I would have been around for that era of photography. The transition to digital had to be fascinating.

One of the weirdest things about that era is that there was a slow-developing awareness that using a powerful shoe-mount speedlight with a digital point and shoot camera (like a "good" Canon PowerSHot G-series for example, or an Olympus 8080 or whatever it was) could elevate the picture quality from mediocre to excellent.

it was the weirdest thing, but early on, many people seemed unwilling to pair their 35mm film camera flash units with their then-new and very expensive digital cameras. This was when d-slr cameras were prohibitively expensive, like $3,000 or much,much more, and most people had only a "digicam". There was a site dedicated to flash unit trigger voltages; people were afraid that high trigger voltage units might ruin these $699 to $1,000 cameras. Or, there was just an un-awareness that hey, good light improves digital images hugely. it was like, for three years, people shot "digicams pics" with the on-camera flash, and there really were no bounce-capable type speedlights made for digital cameras. In the realm of d-slrs, older, film-era flash units could not accurately meter TTL flash bursts because the sensors were more-refective than 35mm film emulsion, so reading "off the film plane" did not work with film-era speedlight flashes and the early d-slrs from Nikon or Canon.

The transition to digital was rather slow, in the d-slr world, until the Canon Rebel and Nikon D70 got to $999..that's when a lotta' folks jumped on board.

 

[webestang64]

I wish I would have been around for that era of photography. The transition to digital had to be fascinating.

Unless you worked in a photo lab. ""The transition to digital had to be frustrating.""........ LOL

 

[vintagesnaps]

Fascinating isn't the word that comes to mind... PITA more like it! lol

 

[dxqcanada]

I wish I would have been around for that era of photography. The transition to digital had to be fascinating.

No it really wasn't ... I was in the photo retail industry back then.
There was a LOT of resistance in moving to digital ... why ... because the industry could not see how they could profit from it.
Most of the industry was based on making prints for people, this is where all the profit was.
I remember having conversations with people within my company about stocking/selling them ... reluctantly they did it, but mostly for show. They wanted to say to customers that we were on the cutting edge.

The first digital camera we had was the Casio QV-10 ... 250kpixel. Only had one unit ... retail price $699.99.
Eventually I did convince them to carry others ... but in the end we did not sell a single one ... why? because the printed image sucked, and many people didn't use computers to view and share images (the Internet was the not same as we know it today ... remember squelching modems). We even started to stock inkjet printers ... and eventually minilab printers came around to being able to print from digital files.
Anyway ... it really did not become a photographic tool until many, many years later.

 

[star camera company]

I am always creeped out in that place knowing George Eastman blew his brains out there.