Best Nikon color photographers

[MattKing]

I still remember being amazed by many things on that tour, but the clear star of the show was the Kodachrome line, which again, was one of the original factory-scale Kodachrome lines. I'm not sure how many they ever built, but I don't think even all KPL labs had them. It was an enclosed structure inside the larger factory building, something like 100 ft. long, and tall and wide enough to drive a car through. We could walk around it, but couldn't look at the actual machinery inside the structure because it was all in the dark, of course.

The employee and family tours at the North Vancouver lab were able to do this better, because they closed the line down for the evening, and ran it in the light, loaded with reels that just had the one mile of leader and one mile of trailer on them - no one mile of spliced together customer film in between!
They even showed us how the operator would deal with a splice failure in the midst of a run - a truly frightening scenario.
That room and machine was clearly smaller than Palo Alto - it was only the size of a city bus .

 

[nikos79]

William Albert Allard and David Allan Harvey, although they later swapped for Leicas M

 

[villagephotog]

The employee and family tours at the North Vancouver lab were able to do this better, because they closed the line down for the evening, and ran it in the light, loaded with reels that just had the one mile of leader and one mile of trailer on them - no one mile of spliced together customer film in between!
They even showed us how the operator would deal with a splice failure in the midst of a run - a truly frightening scenario.
That room and machine was clearly smaller than Palo Alto - it was only the size of a city bus .

Amazing. Would love to have seen that. And I wish I had been older and more aware of how time passes and the world changes when I took that tour, so I could have taken the time to really observe and remember what I was seeing. None of us -- my camera store colleagues and our Kodak hosts -- knew we were looking at a historically and culturally meaningful process and equipment that was already on its way to disappearing forever.

But the other clear memory I have from that tour is exactly those giant rolls of spliced together customer film; I was gobsmacked by that idea. And then on the printing floor, the dozens of printing machines rolling out prints all still on master rolls of paper -- i.e. a 200 or 500 ft. (I don't remember exactly) roll of uncut and unseparated customer prints from dozens of different rolls of film. That roll of paper would then be taken to some other cutting/sorting station, where each individual 3x5 print would be cut from the roll and somehow Kodak would match up the (also now unspliced and cut) negatives, the prints, and the envelope with the customer's name on it. This 24-exposure roll to a family in Fresno, CA, the next one to a grandmother in Eugene, OR. Blew my mind.

As I said, I don't clearly remember many things that I wish I had paid closer attention to, but they did tell us how many rolls of film they averaged every night. My memory wants to say 30,000 rolls, but 40 years later, I don't really know if that's real.

 

[DREW WILEY]

As a kid, I walked barefoot to a little country store as small as a motorhome. There was always Kodachrome and Kodak Gold on the same shelf as rifle and shotgun ammo. The only phone in town was a mahogany crank box on the back wall, connected to an operator in a different county clear across the canyon, an hour drive away. Once a week, the store owner would drive his pickup to the city to get supplies, and drop off any film. The following week, he picked up my slides. Later, at my request, he stocked pre-E6 Agfachrome 50 too, which came with its own mailer, since that required a dedicated process too.

 

[AZD]

Can you point me to some of the very best film photograpers using Nikon on color film? Color only please.

I think we’ve all arrived at the conclusion that the overlap between pro photographers and Nikon is something of a historical and industrial coincidence, but I found something that’s as close to an actual answer as anything.

In my collection if books is a copy of A Day in the Life of America, the result of a grand project to document a single day (May 2nd, 1986) with the assistance of 200 well known photojournalists. Most of the big names from the era appear in the credits.

The project was supported by Kodak and Nikon, as well as other financial donors. Each photographer got 30 rolls of film (Kodachrome, Ektachrome, or Tri-X). A large number were Nikon users, though in the bio and making-of sections you can spot the occasional Leica. I imagine other systems were used, but Nikon (as discussed at length) was dominant at the time. Find a copy of this book and you’ll have a lot of threads to pull.

The book itself is interesting as a historical document, a snapshot in time. It also gives you a good sense of how 35mm color film would have been interpreted and presented when Nikon, Kodak, and the publishing industry were each near their peak.

 

[Taurabon]

Sooooo, just for the historical record, I shot for Gannett newspapers (remember USA Today?) from 1989 to 1996 and we shot exclusively chrome for our daily work (fujichrome 100 and higher speed ektachrome when needed) I believe it was mostly because the editors didn’t really know how to look at negative film.

That’s news to me a daily newspaper used chrome film for breaking news! Thank you for this historical record.

In the early 1990s, I worked part-time in the editorial department at the Osaka headquarters of a major Japanese newspaper. I was assigned to the proofreading department, but I also occasionally helped out in the photo department next door, and I remember that almost all of the film the photojournalists handled was C-41 color negative, even for black-and-white editions.

A minilab was installed within the photo department, and the darkroom, which had previously been the main focus, was rarely used.

The photo department manager, an expert at observing negative film, would select photos for publication directly from the orange mask negatives.

The cameras used by the photojournalists were basically Nikon, and needless to say, this was because the photo department had a wide range of lenses, from fisheye to super telephoto (and also provided extensive support from the manufacturer).

I later worked as a photographer for weekly and monthly magazines, where I delivered almost all of my work on E-6 positive film.