Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

The End of an Era: Kodak to Stop Making Cameras

Say it isn't so! Will there never be another "Kodak moment?"

Eastman Kodak Co, the inventor of the digital camera, plans to get out of the camera business in the first half of this year as the bankrupt company looks to cut costs.

Kodak will stop selling digital cameras along with pocket video cameras and digital picture frames. It also will stop making film. However, that won't make much of a difference as the sale of film has become almost non-existent in recent years. The cost of keeping the film factories open probably exceeds the revenue produced by dwindling sales.

Want to buy some microfilm so that your society can create microfilms of old records? Sorry, Kodak won't be selling any. In fact, almost all of Kodak's competitors have also stopped making microfilm. Kodak pioneered microfilm to image checks in the 1920s and continued to develop the technology for decades. Although once a leader in the field of microimaging, Kodak suffered financially as sales of microfilm and associated hardware slowed to a trickle, only to be replaced by cheaper digital technologies. Now all manufacture of microfilm has ceased.

Was This the First Motor Home?

Click on the image above to view a larger picture.

Four Easy Tips for Preserving Your Digital Photographs

If you have an interest in preserving photographs (and who doesn't?), you might want to read the article by Butch Lazorchak in the Library of Congress' digital preservation section at http://goo.gl/EeVZU. It is a short article but has good advice.

 

Library and Archives Canada Unveils a New Preservation Facility for Nitrate Film

Some of Canada's oldest films and photographs, recorded on deteriorating and highly combustible cellulose nitrate, now have a safe home. Library and Archives Canada unveiled its new $14.7-million preservation facility for nitrate film on the government's Shirleys Bay campus Tuesday.

The new building houses 5,575 reels of nitrate film dating back to 1912. Famous titles include Back to God's Country (1919), the oldest existing Canadian feature film, and Churchill's Island, the first Canadian film to win an Oscar (in 1941). There are also almost 600,000 nitrate photograph negatives.

Professional Photograph Restoration Workflow

Damien Haw has written a great tutorial on restoring an old torn photograph using Photoshop although I suspect the same techniques can be used in all of the other sophisticated photo editing programs. It is an interesting step-by-step instruction in using many of the available tools.

Professional Photograph Restoration Workflow may be found at http://psd.tutsplus.com/tutorials/photo-effects-tutorials/professional-photograph-restoration-workflow/

Are You Giving Away Your Personal Information?

NOTE: This article has nothing to do with genealogy. However, I will suggest that every computer owner and every owner of a digital camera should be aware of the issues mentioned here. Please feel free to send this article to others or to republish it elsewhere, as you see fit.

Would you give a stalker the street address of your home? Would you give a pedophile the precise location where your children play? If you have posted a picture online, you may have already done that.

Pictures taken with GPS-equipped digital cameras usually embed the GPS coordinates within each picture. Most cameras have an option to turn this capability on or off, but the default setting usually is ON. Unless you have taken action to specify otherwise, the camera probably is recording the exact location of every picture you take, plus or minus 10 feet to perhaps 50 feet.

Combustible Microfilm Forces Evacuation at LDS Church History Library

Microfilms do not last forever. In fact, older microfilms can self-destruct in the best "Mission Impossible" manner imaginable. Yesterday, a microfilm from the LDS Church History Library in Salt Lake City was taken to a landfill and detonated after patrons had been evacuated from the building.

NOTE: This happened at the LDS Church History Library, not at the nearby LDS Family History Library that is used by tens of thousands of genealogists.

Magic with Your Digital Camera: Geocoding Your Images with Chris Bair

Chris Bair is one of the presenters scheduled for the RootsTech Conference in Salt Lake City, which is less than 4 weeks from now. His presentation on Friday afternoon will be on Geocoding Your Images. Today, I had a chance to talk with and even see Chris in a two-way video call on Skype. He kindly gave me a sneak preview of his presentation. In fact, he gave me enough of a preview that I am now convinced I want to attend his presentation next month to learn more.

Chris works as a system administrator, making computer networks work at FamilySearch headquarters in Salt Lake City. However, his presentation on geocoding has nothing to do with his employment. It is a personal interest and hobby of his. Chris has become an expert on geocoding and decided to share some of his expertise at the conference.

Store Your Digital Data Forever

Like every other dad with a digital camera, Kai Pommerenke started taking lots of photos after his daughter was born. But the more he researched, the less convinced he became that those pictures would still be around when she grew up. Hard drives crash. CDs and DVDs warp. Companies that store your photos online can go out of business. Pommerenke wanted a solution that would last forever.

"People definitely have a false sense of security," Pommerenke says. "Digital data is fragile. You have to do something active in order to preserve it." Pommerenke found a solution. His new non-profit organization reportedly will preserve digital photographs, audio, video, text, blogs, status updates, or anything else kept in a digital format, forever.

His service, Chronicle of Life, aims to ease he worries by devoting the same level of care to personal digital files that large institutions give to their own data.

Momma, Don't Take My Kodachrome Away

I hope you managed to get all your old rolls of Kodachrome film developed. As I mentioned last July at http://goo.gl/7uf5x, processing for the film is ending. The last processing machine, located at Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas, is being shut down and sold for scrap at the end of business today. There are no other Kodachrome processing plants left in operation.

You Tube Time Machine

These are the movies and sound recordings our ancestors flocked to see and hear. At least, some of them are. The later ones are some that I saw not that many years ago.

The You Tube Time Machine is a collection of audio and video snippets from 1860 (that is NOT a typo!) through 2010 that provide a history of movies, videos, and sound recordings. I rather enjoyed looking at some of the older ones, before 1920. These are really corny and it is difficult to imagine anyone paying money to see them. However, when moving pictures were still a novelty, I guess it didn't take much of a plot to entice audiences to watch.

Fungus Threatens Historic Film Archives

Home movies on cine film, videos and even TV and film archive can end up covered in fungal mould if they are not stored correctly. The problem is serious, according to Pamela Rutherford, a reporter for BBC News. She writes, "A record of British life on film could be threatened from an emerging 'disease' which eats away at film."

Cinematographic film has a layer of gelatin on its surface. This emulsion layer is where the image is formed but also provides ideal food for fungi like Aspergillus and Penicillium. If the fungus forms a layer of mould on a film it produces enzymes which allow it to use the film as food and to grow. So the damage it can cause is irreversible as the mould "eats" the image stored on the film's surface.

The Dangers of Geotagging

Last year I wrote about geotagging photographs. Geotagging can be a major addition to digital photographs. In short, geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification to digital photographs, video, websites, or even RSS feeds. The information added typically consists of latitude and longitude coordinates, but it can also include altitude, bearing, accuracy data, and place names. However, the New York Times reports that security experts and privacy advocates have begun warning consumers about the potential dangers of geotags, which are embedded in photos and videos taken with GPS-equipped smartphones and digital cameras.

Changing History One Photograph at a Time

Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov has taken old, black-and-white World War II photographs and overlaid them onto present day color photographs of the exact same locations. The results appear to be eery wartime ghosts that re-appear in today's world.

The scenes are mostly from Prague, Vienna, and Moscow.

You can view Larenkov's work at http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/the-ghosts-of-world-war-iis

1848 Daguerreotypes of Cincinnati

In 1848, Charles Fontayne and William Porter produced some of the best photographs ever produced at the time: a panorama spanning some 2 miles of Cincinnati waterfront. They did it with eight 6.5-by 8.5-inch daguerreotype plates, a then-new technology that in skilled hands displays mind-blowing resolution. The plates have been preserved.

Three years ago, conservators at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, began restoration work on the deteriorating plates. It wasn't until then that photography historians realized just how good the pictures were. When displayed at 30-power magnification, you can see curtains in distant windows and even identify individual spokes on wagon wheels.

Momma, Don't Take My Kodachrome Away

When I think back on all the crap I've learned in high school
It's a wonder I can think at all
Though my lack of education hasn't hurt me much
I can read the writings on the walls

Kodachrome, they give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away

Paul Simon's lyrics seem sadly prophetic. This week, Kodachrome went away. The last roll of Kodachrome film was developed at Dwayne's Photo Service in Parsons, Kansas. We have witnessed an historic shift in technology.

National Library of Scotland's Historic Photos on Flickr

From the last letter written by Mary, Queen of Scots, to First World War photographs in the personal collection of Field Marshal Earl Haig, images from the National Library of Scotland's historic collection have been shared worldwide through the website Flickr. The NLS has released more than 2,000 archived images, in one of the biggest-ever groups of photographs placed on the Flickr's "The Commons" website.

They are mostly from the library's Haig collection, but also include more than 100 evocative photographs of tenements on the south side of Edinburgh taken in 1929. They include another historic milestone from the library's collection, the order for the Massacre of Glencoe.

Jewish History of the Late 1940s in Color Videos

Fred Monosson, a Boston Jewish multimillionaire, purchased one of the first privately-owned portable color movie cameras in the 1940s, then traveled to Europe and Israel to record the historical formation of the state of Israel in color. He used color films, which nobody else could afford at that time. The films were later stored in a Boston attic and forgotten. His grandchildren recently cleaned out the house to prepare it for sale and were about to throw out the old films, believing that nobody would want them. However, one of the grandchildren decided to first call a friend who was an Israeli movie director.

When he first saw the films, the director couldn't believe his eyes. The dozens of hours of color films contain footage of many significant events in the history of Israel, events that had never before been seen in color. People easily identifiable on these color films include a very young Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Tabenkin (head of the Palmach), as well as British Mandate soldiers walking the streets of Jerusalem.

The Olympus Digital Camera 740 – Excellent Photo and Genealogy Tool

Blogger Kyle Olsen has written an article of interest to many genealogists who also have an interest in photography. Olsen writes, "The Olympus Digital Camera 740 could be a really good tool for your genealogy research. Genealogy is becoming more and more popular, and I find myself more often taking pictures of old photographs and documents. Have you ever noticed just how small those images tend to be? You need a camera with great zooming capabilities. That is what led me to the Olympus Digital Camera 740."

You can read Kyle Olsen's full review at http://mytopcamerareviews.com/the-olympus-digital-camera-740-–-the-best-genealogy-tool

A Family Tree on the Tombstone

Don't you wish that all tombstones included a list of family members? Here's a picture I took in the Mount Hope Cemetery in Barre, Vermont.

Click on the thumbnail image to see a larger picture.