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…
Besides its Google Earth announcement yesterday, Google also announced the ability to 
