MIT Weblog Survey

Take the MIT Weblog SurveyBoing Boing posts about the MIT Weblog Survey:

The MIT Media Lab’s Cameron Marlow, creator of the excellent Blogdex service, is in the final throes of his PhD, and as part of his project, he’s conducting a survey of bloggers:

This is a general social survey of the greater weblog community being conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Our goal is to help understand the way that weblogs are affecting the way we communicate with each other. Specifically we are interested in issues of demographics, communication behaviors, experience with weblogs and other technology, and the meaning of various types of social links within the blogosphere.

Kodak To Stop Making Black And White Paper

A couple of weeks ago, Kodak announced that it will stop making black and white photographic paper and chemicals for processing.

Having taken a black and white photography class a couple of years ago, I have a definite appreciation for developing my own film and making my own prints, but I also acknowledge that the digital revolution is slowly but surely allowing almost all darkroom functions to be reproduced digitally. There’s still something to be said for the art of tweaking your own print in a darkroom that will probably never be reproduced on a computer, but I have to admit that it takes a lot longer…

I bought my own photographic enlarger after my class and had a grand scheme of building a darkroom in our unfinished basement, but I’m not sure that will ever happen, partly because I’ve learned to work pretty well digitally, but also because I don’t know that I’ll ever want to deal with buying and maintaining all of the associated chemicals and equipment.

Many alternatives exist for black and white paper and chemicals. However, Kodak has always been the de facto leader in photographic products, and its abandonment of this format could be a death knell for conventional black and white photography…