Truth is though, there is plenty of chrome film around right now.  Are you shooting 35mm or MF?  A freezer and $1k would buy you enough film for a long, long, long time.  Someone just gave me 20 rolls of Elite Chrome 35mm.

Look through the viewfinder.  Set the shutter dial to account for subject motion and match the needles using the aperture ring.  Open up a stop or two if backlit, close down a bit if brightly lit.  Or use the old “sunshine f/16″ rule.  Squeeze the shutter.

Today, I either have to trust to an auto-exposure setting or wade through a stack of menus, with controls that do one thing at menu setting A and something entirely different at menu settings B through Z.    

And I suppose the economies of manufacturing for the market dictate that there will never be a digital camera for old film farts like me, one made with dedicated shutter and aperture controls and a set-it-yourself operating mode philosophy.

None-the-less I’ll miss Kodak.  My father worked for a company that made film but he was never satisfied with anything but Kodak. Kodachrome was one of the few brand names he commonly use in speech.

Black and white film chemistry is relatively simple and lends itself well to a cottage industry. It will be around forever, made by small shops. Color doesn’t have this property. Its chemistry is much more difficult to work so once the big players shut down and the distribution channels clear it will be very difficult to source.

The reason film has lasted as long as it has is Hollywood. Those wonderful recent films were made for movies. Movie volume is huge (not for shooting, for distribution) and it was the thing that supported these large factories. Movies are switching to digital en-masse right now, so the film volume is now gone. The artsy film photog was essentially buying scraps, and neither Kodak nor Fuji can live off selling just those scraps.

From a commercial standpoint, color film is dead. BW film is a tiny niche.

As far as B&W film, Ilford makes pretty competitive products.  In a perfect world there would be a competitive market with multiple suppliers, but Kodak and Fuji could both go out of business and there would still be a really good company producing excellent film.  Additionally there is some pretty good Czech film and some pretty crappy but useable Chinese film.  

Whether they will be around in a year or 5 is a bigger question.  But Ilford and Fuji are both making very, very nice film too.  Ilford appears to be in it for the long haul.  Fuji is a crapshoot.  

Here’s a picture I took on some brand new 4×5 Kodak film in October.  

http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulmcevoy/8112892755/

Their failure is precisely BECAUSE they concentrated on film, and got sunk by it. I wouldn’t be so sentimental about their own killer.

It’s definitely a business blunder and not a failure of engineering. I bet that within a few years we’ll see the business schools teach their story as a failure.

Kodak had every piece in place to shape and grow digital photography. However, it didn’t know how to execute. This wouldn’t have “saved” film, but the company would have been able to have the resources to steward silver-halide photography into something new and different had it not failed at its basic task of existence.