POLAROID AND KODAK HAVE REVOLUTIONIZED PHOTOGRAPHIC TECHNOLOGY AND MADE CAMERAS SO UNCOMPLICATED EVEN A CHILD CAN OPERATE THEM. THE NEW CAMERAS, MOREOVER, ARE INEXPENSIVEBRINGING PHOTOGRAPHY WITHIN EVERYONE'S REACH.
. MAKING PICTURE-TAKING A SNAP
The story is told about the time a woman confided to her friend that she hadn't the faintest notion how electricity worked. "Oh," said the second lady, "that's simple. You just turn on the switch and the light goes on." The same could be said of photography. All of us know that you put film in a camera, aim at the object, snap the shutter, develop the film, and there's the picture. But the quality depended on the price of the camera and the skill of the user. In the last decade, American technology has changed all this. The Kodakand Polaroid companies have made inexpensive cameras that take quality photographs, yet are so uncomplicated that even a child can operate them. Not only are they easy to use, but they are also easy to carry; some are so compact they can be slipped into a shirt pocket. In the vernacular of America, Kodak and¡ Polaroid have made picture-taking "a snap." Of the $4,000 million a year U.S. photo industry, amateur photography accounts for half, and the amateur market is divided between Kodak and Polaroid. The new American cameras for the masses have turned many middle and working class families into
The new American cameras are easy to operate: a glance in the viewer, a snap of the shutter-and a picture is taken. The cameras produce quality photos like the Polaroid color picture of the little girl at right or sharp black-andwhites like the one at left.
photographers. More and more amateurs are taking pictures of people, places and things. Says Time magazine: "The new popularity is transforming photography from a mere hobby to a natural, even essential way of looking at the world and capturing life as it is." Cameras like Kodak's Instamatic
and Polaroid's SX-70 are marvels of miniaturization and complex technology, and yet all the photographer has to do is aim and snap and the result is remarkably sharp photographs, either in black and white or full color. Kodak's pocket Instamatic is about an inch thick and-depending
on the model-weighs between 5.6 and 9 ounces. The story of the Instamatic is instructive, for it draws together all the elements that have made the Eastman Kodak Company what it is today. The Instamatic camera was conceived on the basis of one simple fact. As a Kodak official summed it up: "Something was preventing nearly half the American households from taking any pictures at all." Why? Because cameras-though simple-were stilI more trouble to use than many people would accept. What the people wanted was a camera that could be quickly and easily loaded, unloaded and preset for picture taking. What emerged in 1963 after years of Kodak research was a series of nine cameras. The cheapest and the simplest was even easier to use than the old "Brownie" camera; it had one shutter speed, manual film ad-
'PHOTOGRAPHY TODAY HAS REACHED UNDREAMED OF DIMENSIONS, WITH THE PHOTOGRAPHER AS FREE TO EXPERIMENT WITH COLOR, WITH LIGHT AND SHADE, AS AN ARTIST WITH HIS PAINTS.'
vance, and a fixed-focus lens that was always wide open. At the opposite end, both in price and in features, was a model with adjustablelens open ing and shutter speeds, both set by an automatic lightmetering system, mechanical film advance, and range-finder focusing. By the middle of 1970 some 50 millionInstamatic cameras had been sold around the world. Then, in early 1972, Kodak introduced the new, miniature, pocket Instamatic, and first-year sales alone are estimated at four million. In developing the Instamatic, Kodak scientists and engineers began with the concept of the film cartridge. Completely enclosing the film,the cartridge could be snapped into the camera and snapped out of it almost without looking or thinking. There was no film to unwind and thread by hand; indeed the film, enclosed in its cartridge, was never seen by the user! Made of plastic, the small cartridge was asymmetrical. The asymmetry meant that it could be inserted in the camera Kodak makes an impressive array of films and photographic equipment for professionals as well as for amateurs. Left, above: Strobe light "stops" a .22-caliber bullet travelingat 335 meters per second on Kodak High Speed Ektachrome film. Left: Another use of strobe light. Here, the photographer has captured, in multiple images, the movemenl of a man with reflecting tapes attached to his head, neck, shoulders,arms and legs. The result is a portrait of muscular movement that aids scientists in studying the action of muscles. On this page, right: One of the more conventional photographic subjects taken with a Polaroid camera in a New Delhi garden.
only one way-the correct way. The Eastman Kodak Company is the world's largest producer of photographic film and cameras. From the six-employee firm George Eastman started in 1881, Kodak now employs 110,000 people in its manufacturing operations in eight nations around the world. It has grown to become the 28th largest American company, according to Fortune magazine's 1971ranking. Probably no one has done more to change photography from a specialized elitist pursuit to an avocation that nearly everyone can adopt than George Eastman. Born in
1854,he was 24 when he became interested in photography and invested in a complete wet-plate outfit. Like many a photographer before him, he chafed under the limitations of the process. Reading in a British magazine about experiments with gelatin emulsions, he determined to try them himself. The great advantage of emulsion coatings on plates was that they were dry; therefore they could be quickly and easily exposed whenever the photographer wished. And they could be processed at leisure. Eastman started preparing plates for his own use, but it was not long
before he saw the potential for selling dry plates to others. This realization led to his first major invention, a machine which mass-produced dry plates and thereby made it possible for people with no knowledge of the chemistry of photography to take pictures. That was in 1879.Ten years later, after a series of experiments in making plates, Eastman marketed the first commercial transparent roll film. By 1908, the company had produced the first commercially practical safety film, whose base was cellulose acetate, a great improvement over the highly flammable cellulose nitrate. The company's first camera appeared on the market in 1888 and set a style that the firm has followed ever since. The "number one" Kodak camera cost $25 and came loaded with enough film for 100 exposures. Two years later came the first folding camera. In 1900 the first "Brownie" camera was introduced. The Brownie, Kodak assured customers, could be operated by a schoolchild. The idea was to reach a mass market, and it was an idea that Kodak has followed successfully ever since. It is true that more than half of Kodak's photo-products sales are to professionals, but this is because of their enormous sales of film. Kodak makes an impressive array of photographic products. Besides the cameras and the millions of little yellow boxes of film, it makes film for microfilming, for xrays, for the graphic arts and for the scores of special effects often desired by professionals (such as the photographs on pages 38 and 40). Photography today has reached undream-
SCIENTIFIC ADVANCES IN PHOTOGRAPHY HAVE MADE CAMERAS SO VERSATILE THAT THEY CAN MEET THE DEMANDS OF THE HIGHLY QUALIFIED PROFESSIONAL AS WELL AS THE RANK AMATEUR.
ed of dimensions, with the photographer as free to experiment with color, with light and shade, as an artist with his paints. While George Eastman and his Kodak company did yeoman service to make photography simple, inexpensive,foolproof and fun, it took another American genius in phototechnology, Edwin H. Land, to do the seemingly impossible-develop a camera that could take, process and print a color photograph in six minutes! The idea ¡of "instant" photography first occurred to Land during a 1943vacation in New Mexico. He took a picture of one of his two daughters. "How soon can I see it?" she asked. That set Dr. Land thinking. He now claims jokingly that by the time he and Jennifer had returned from their walk, he had solved in his mind all the technical problems "except for the ones that it has taken from 1943 to 1972 to solve." At a meeting of the Optical Society of America in 1947, Dr. Land announced his invention of an instant picture-taking process. He introduced his first "snap it, see it" camera the next year. Since then Polaroid has sold more than 26 million of them. The Polaroid SX-70, introduced The Hialeah Race Track in Florida (leJt) takes on an unearthly look in this photograph taken from the air on Kodak Ektachrome Infrared Aero film. Photo shows the lake as very dark, field and wooded areasas very light. Kodak's 'Aero film has wide applications in agricultural,hydrological and geologicalstudies. At right is an example of a Polaroid camera in action. You snap the shutter; seconds later, you see the picture.
in 1972, marks the crowning effort in the quarter-century of instant photography. It is truly a remarkable box of magic. Only 1.5 seconds after the shutt.er has been clicked, the photograph is ejected from the camera by an electric motor. Well, not quite. The thing ejected isn't really a picture but a white frame enclosing a turquoise-colored piece of plastic. The back of the picture-the negative area-is black. About 30 seconds later, a faint image begins to appear on the plastic. Three minutes later the colors are clearly formed; in another three minutes the picture is fully developed. Sheathed in scratch-proof plastic and reinforced by a thin coating of titanium, it is dry to the touch even while developing-a welcome change from the sticky prints that have been a part of Polaroid photography. The SX-70 is indeed an impressive technological achievement. The most remarkable thing about the SX-70, however, is its film. The color film is a 17-layer sandwich of compounds, some a few thousandths of an inch thick. A three-part pod containing a mere 0.5 cc of chemicals is ruptured by the rollers which eject the film from the camera. Both the SX-70 and the Instamatic are revolutionary cameras, designed to bring high-quality photography to the masses. Incredibly complex in their technology, they are amazingly simple to operate. And their prices put them within reach of the average American worker. It is estimated that amateurs in the United States snap more than 5,000 million photographs a year-or about 158 each second. If recent sales are any indication, the new cameras may soon become as widely used as telephones. 0