kodak

You should find something better to do with your time,_ Mandy told him. __ spend my time shooting people, and then I take them to darkrooms and blow them up.___Come again?_ Alecto questioned with a tone of alarm in his voice. __ take photographs and develop them myself, I__e got my own darkroom_ it was a joke,_ Mandy laughed. __ love photography and I__ gonna be a photojournalist someday.___eally?_ Alecto asked. For the first time since she__ met him, he sounded slightly enthusiastic. __I take photographs and I film my own home movies, I have a darkroom as well_ but I can__ be a photojournalist like you_ I can__ be anything_ still, at least I can take photographs, it__ fun.

There was a super-8 steel town somewhere, where all the forgotten things in the cruel world ended up eventually, Mandy was sure of it_ this place, she decided, was called Smog City.

We were poor back then. Not living in a cardboard carton poor, not __e might have to eat the dog_ poor, but still poor. Poor like, no insurance poor, and going to McDonald's was a really big excitement poor, wearing socks for gloves in the winter poor, and collecting nickels and dimes from the washing machine because she never got allowance, that kind of poor_ poor enough to be nostalgic about poverty. So, when my mom and dad took me here for my tenth birthday, it was a really big deal. They__ saved up for two months to take me to the photography store and they bought me a Kodak Instamatic film camera_ I really miss those days, because we were still a real family back then_ this mall doesn__ even have a film photography store anymore, just a cell phone and digital camera store, it__ depressing_

Alford, Massachusetts: Mandy stood there with her old Nikon film camera, snapping photo after photo of the rural landscape. It was difficult to describe the wonderful feeling of there not being a single cell phone in sight; the only modern technology around was the faint blue glow of a cathode ray tube television in the window of a nearby house, and a few cars and trucks parked in crumbling gravel driveways. She was allowed to see this place, one that would likely be ruined by the 21st century as time went on_ places like these were extremely hard to find these days. A world of wood-burning cookstoves and the waxy smell of Paraffin, laundry hung out to dry, rusty steel bridges over streams that reflected the bright blue skies, apple pies left out on windowsills_ a world of hard work with very little to show for it aside from the sunlight beaming down on a proud community. And Mandy wanted to trap it all in her Kodak film rolls and rescue it from the future.

Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took.

To be honest, I__e always made films and I never really stopped, starting with little stop-motion experiments using my dad__ Super 8 camera. In my mind, it__ all one big continuum of filmmaking and I__e never changed.

Kodachrome... it gives us those nice, bright colors,gives us the greens of summers,makes ya think all the world's a sunny day,Oh yeah!I've got a Nikon camera, I'd love to take a photograph,so mama don't take...my Kodachrome away...

Oftentimes she wondered what had happened to super 8. Sure, it made perfect sense that nobody wanted the hassle of spending money on a three-minute cartridge of film and threading it through a projector, but though digital cameras were convenient and cheap, Mandy didn__ care. Super 8 had integrity, it wasn__ just nostalgia, it was art, it was history, it was a little recording medium that somehow possessed the power to evoke lost memories, to turn back time, and there was something dazzling about waiting excitedly for a reel of film to come back in its yellow and red Kodak envelope, eating buttered popcorn while the projector paraded life__ best moments, and capturing something beautiful in only three minutes.

LED lighting has its place: cold, detached, hollow places like office buildings, factories, fast food chains and public schools - places full of humans but no human emotions. LED lighting really belongs in the apathy of the digital age, where science and technology rules over friendship, love and freedom. Incandescent light bulbs have a warm yellow-orange glow like the glow of a nice fireplace, where friends and family might sit and talk together or where children might open Christmas presents, a glow that can project celluloid films and bring back old memories, a glow that can light the text of a paperback novel. Something that beautiful, with that much power, could never last very long in a time as depressing and uncertain as the 21st century.

We make, see, and love films, not digitals. To convert all of our movies, home videos, theaters, photographs and television to digital would be like telling a painter to throw away his brushes and canvas for an I-Pad. Celluloid isn't just nostalgic, it's an art form and, like it or not, it's superior to digital. It lasts much longer, it provides grain and brighter colors, and it takes more effort so that it produces something wonderful. With the inferior binary codes, pixels and untested shelf-life of digital files, plus the fact that these days anyone with a digital camera, even a two-year-old, can make a video and pollute the world with self-photography and cat pictures, film has a lot more integrity and worth than digital.

What are you doing?_ Alecto asked in surprise, stepping back. Laughing brightly, she dragged him towards the greenhouse, the shattered glass reflecting rainbows as brilliant as a million Kodak flashcubes, glittering as they were cascaded through the breeze. __ee, don__ be afraid of the glass, it can__ hurt us,_ Mandy laughed, spectacularly eccentric, her eyes reflecting the fallen glass.__ wasn__ afraid of the glass, but this isn__ a very secluded place that you just decided to vandalize,_ Alecto cautioned, smiling despite his words. Before Mandy could reply, she heard loud whispering in the air, behind the trees_ it sounded like a group of people, all whispering in unison_ __omebody__ out there,_ she exclaimed nervously.__eah, you__e right,_ Alecto replied. Suddenly a sharp new vibrancy seemed to fill his eyes and he smiled coldly, taking the tree branch from Mandy and rapidly smashing in all of Mrs. Matthias_ stained glass house windows with it. Blue, green, yellow, red, turquoise, purple and an array of other colors showered through the sky noisily, sounding like wind chimes and crashing waves. __hey__l go away,_ he told her, glancing up at the sky.__Alecto, do you like me?_ Mandy questioned, holding out her arms like a lopsided scarecrow as the glass fell through her dark red hair.__eah, sure,_ he answered.__ill you be my friend, then? A real friend, not just another person who feels sorry for me?_ Mandy asked.__Alright, Mandy Valems,_ Alecto agreed.

photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself_

_Maybe I__l be watching super-8 home videos,_ Alecto told her, smiling bleakly. __ love my super-8 camera, it__ an Eastman Kodak one_ Kodak stopped manufacturing them, the world went digital and now Kodak has stopped making Kodachrome film and all kinds of traditional film products_ it__ sad._ __ell, uh_ well, have fun watching your home movies then,_ Mandy finished, but she didn__ have the slightest idea what he was talking about.

How promising today's generation is. They can whip out their cellular phones like sheep, instantly take a million digital photos of their cat and then just delete them. But I'd like to see these kids try to artfully use a traditional film camera or make a super 8 home movie. Traditional film takes integrity, nostalgia, effort, patience and imagination - things that the 21st century has very little of. Everything these days, even a superior medium like film photography with an extensively vivid history and an iconic meaning, is becoming disposable in this age.

In her eyes was the reflection of everything that mattered: old diners with neon signs, vinyl records, celluloid film, drive-in movies, Pears soap, department stores, her brother__ old blue Camaro car and the smell of coal dust in the rainy sky of a summer lightning storm._And all the nice bright colors of the past that she thought were gone for good came flowing back into her life like a wave of nostalgia flooding over her, reds, yellows, blues and greens drenching her gray memories in psychedelic ribbons and glittering fireworks._She hoped that the world would always hold those miniscule yet beautiful, deep and mysterious traces of memory.

People say that a time machine can__ be invented, but they__e already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world__ first time machines.

Nobody has ever taken a photograph of something they want to forget. We can build a wall of happy Kodak moments around ourselves, a wall of our Christmases, birthdays, baby showers and weddings, but we can never forget that celluloid film is see-through, that behind it, all the misery of real life waits for our wall to collapse someday.

Have you ever noticed how as an adult, all the bright colors go out of your life? Now that I__ not a kid anymore, things always look gray, like a clothesline draped with laundry that__ been washed too many times and left to stand in the wind. I guess that__ what growing up is_ it__ a fading photograph.