Message for Simon of Harman/ Ilford

David A. Goldfarb · Oct 17, 2009

I recall the Ilfopro newsletter. I liked it, but for some reason, my subscription info kept getting lost, and I stopped following it.

As much as I like to hold a newsletter in my hand without having to print it out, most of the professional organizations that I belong to have put their newsletters online to save printing and mailing expenses, usually sending an e-mail with a link to announce when it's available.

From Harman's point of view, I suspect the main question would be whether a newsletter will sell more film and paper, and in what form that would be most effective. Even if a hard copy is available, it would be easy to offer a PDF as well. Maybe Harman could partner with Freestyle or other big mail order retailers and put a newsletter as an insert in their catalogue. Then you're reaching the segment that likes to purchase photo supplies from a catalogue that comes in the mail, and they've got the newsletter and the catalogue in hand at the same time. If it's being printed anyway as a catalogue insert, then some sort of free subscription arrangement could be set up, so that those who don't get a catalogue and don't like PDFs but want a hard copy can request it, and that group would be a well targeted audience.

Martin Reed · Oct 18, 2009

Remember Harman's target market is now the educational one, ie predominantly youthful. In todays 'Twittering' society, where 140 characters seems to be the maximum attention span, such a publication is probably no longer an effective vehicle.

That the Ilford Pro magazine made it through such a long run & was discontinued in 2003 tells it's own story, by that time it must have been getting difficult to source enough analogue orientated material to fill it properly.

Creating magazine set pieces for collectors to file, & similar one-off big promotion stuff, is like chucking mud at a wall, most of it will slide off. Harman must be capturing a lot of contacts through their lab services, and increasingly through their direct sales now, I suspect that's where their promotional efforts will be concentrated.

Mike Crawford · Oct 18, 2009

Martin Reed said:
That the Ilford Pro magazine made it through such a long run & was discontinued in 2003 tells it's own story, by that time it must have been getting difficult to source enough analogue orientated material to fill it properly.

A good point about the date. The magazine/newsletter was aimed at their professional client base which of course is now also, (in the misquoted words of Steven Brierley), a much 'diminished' market when it comes to analouge black and white. The costs of now producing a printed version for whatever market would be quite prohibitive compared to providing a pdf to download.

Tom Kershaw · Oct 18, 2009

Mike,

How popular was black & white for commercial work in the more recent decades?

Tom

Ian Grant · Oct 18, 2009

In the late 80's B&W was about half of all the work of many commercial photographers undertook. In the area I come from in the UK (20 miles from the nearest city) there were at least a dozen in-house darkrooms in a wide variety of companies, and around another 6-8 professional advertising/commercial photographers with darkrooms, plus a news-paper with a B&W darkroom and one commercial lab. That's not including the wedding/social photographers and a few part-times/freelancers.

Ian

Martin Reed · Oct 18, 2009

Tom Kershaw said:
Mike,
How popular was black & white for commercial work in the more recent decades?
Tom

To put it in perspective, until around (guessing here) 1990, Ilford had for decades run the Ilford Print Awards, which offered up some substantial prizes for the best commercial B&W photography & printing, which was open to all professional comers but tended to be dominated by the news media. The prize giving ceremony was paid for by Ilford, given at the Lancaster Hotel, a la Brit Awards, big video screens & seating for 500, round tables, 6 course meals, the lot.

It's rather hard now to visualise just how large the B&W market was. But all the big consumers were rapidly eroding in the '80's, graphic arts, cine, the news industry. All that's left now are the enthusiasts, a certain level of sales reaching the art market, and the photo elements of the educational market. All we can hope is that it's bottomed out - if photo courses were redrawn citing scarcity of film/paper/chemical supplies we would all be in trouble.

Bob Carnie · Oct 18, 2009

Tom

I can help here with a few un - audited numbers based on my Operation here in Canada.
I opened my black white lab here in Toronto in 1991 after 10 years commercial printing in quality labs.
1992-98 approximately 120k-200k average per year for process and contact of black white film...** Bulk of my clients were professional photographers.***
At that time I had to open with 5 or 6 existing BW specialty labs in my City to compete against and they were all doing well.

1999-2007 approximately 15k -65k average per year for process and contact.***by 2007 I could count on very little work from commercial photographers but a small army of project based art photographers emerged***
Today and prediction ***50 k - 120k average per year for process and contact****Now only project based photographers and 0 commercial work****
Now there is only one other lab, doing Black White at a high quality level and he is wanting to fade into the distance, as he did operate in the 70's and 80's and put a good amount of money away when the amount of black and white jobs were off the wall.

I believe if I started in 1975 my numbers would have been incredible in the 80's but the letdown would be to immense leading into the 2000's.
I think this tremendous drop is what lead to a lot of printers a few years older than I deciding to get out of the game completely.
We saw around 10 labs close between 2001 and now.
I also believe that my numbers are now increasing year to year as basically our lab is one of the only games around processing film to the same standards you could get in the 80's.
So Tom , the market has completely reversed from professional to art photographer. I do not think you will ever see the professional market picking up film cameras again. Sad to say but I believe to be true.
Just a side note , last night I went to the airport and picked up a mixture of 8x10 and 4x5 HPF process and contact- 500sheets. this is a personal project and I see this job twice a year. If it were a commerical photographer I would not see the order, it probably would be a BW conversion and inkjet wannnabe black white print.

Tom Kershaw said:
Mike,

How popular was black & white for commercial work in the more recent decades?

Tom

Tom Kershaw · Oct 18, 2009

Do you think the other markets, art sales, enthusiast, and educational, have reduced significantly as well? The act of putting together a private darkroom surely indicates a certain level of sales potential, unless done on a purely experimental basis.

Tom

trexx · Oct 18, 2009

PeteZ8 said:
Just incase anyone from Ilford is watching this thread, one other note.

Here in the US I have never seen a 5 litre storage container. Please take note.

Thank you.

While Freestyle has them, I was surprised to see the local photo processing store only had 5L storage containers.

Mike Crawford · Oct 18, 2009

Tom Kershaw said:
Mike,

How popular was black & white for commercial work in the more recent decades?

Tom

This question doesn't bear thinking about! I started working in a lab in London in 1984 and the business is now changed so much it is difficult to remember how many labs were once around. (I think it took me two weeks to find a job after college.) I have no figures, but I would imagine the amount of professional b/w film based photography (and hence lab work) today is about 5-10% of what was happening 25 years ago. I expect nearer the 5% mark! Nearly every type of photographer would use black and white though some more than others. If they did not have their own darkroom, they would be using a professional lab. Some, once or twice a week, others once a month, but almost everyone would shoot black and white at some point in the year. 'The Lab' was also a bit of a social meeting point for photographers and assistants. Professional photography in London used to be a lot more social but now most will be back at home or in the office on the computer, processing digitally, uploading, downloading getting a bad back and not talking to anyone.

Of course as the industry has changed and evolved, many labs, (to continue the Darwinian metaphor), have either closed or adapted to the market. Fifteen years ago I was working for advertising photographers though as they were the first to embrace digital we then got into fashion photographers. That's pretty much in the past as it would be difficult for photographers to justify the cost of film, processing, printing and retouching for an editorial story when it is usually cheaper on digital. (They used to be able to afford it so who's now getting the money?) I now work on my own and most of my darkroom work is for exhibitions, print sales and portrait photographers who sell themselves on the high quality of traditional photography. Other than that I also print digitally for exhibition work though for my own photography I remain very committed to film and the darkroom.

I could probably write pages about the changes but I think that might depress me a bit so back to the darkroom for me.

sambuff33 · Oct 18, 2009

cool !!!!

Steve Roberts · Oct 19, 2009

alexmacphee said:
You can halve 16 oz and still have nice round numbers, and halve it again and again and again, and still have whole numbers.

Indeed, computer boffins make such a big thing about binary numbers and sequences, but the Imperial system got there centuries ago! Notably with measurements of length, the unit can be devolved down to whatever fraction of an inch is necessary to achieve the desired degree of accuracy. If the metric system is ever to succeed, it needs at the very least a "metric eighth of an inch"!
Steve

Q.G. · Oct 19, 2009

What a silly example of silliness...

You can have half a mm too.
Divide that thingy in two, and you'll have a fourth of a mm.
Do that again, and you'll have an eighth of a mm.
Etc. "Down to whatever fraction of" a mm "is necessary to achieve the desired degree of accuracy".

You can half every even number, and as long as it's larger than 1, still have a nice round number.
You eventually arrive at 1, and when you proceed to halve that again and again, the nominator will be and remain a nice even number.

Now try to halve an imperial 5 oz and still get even, round numbers.

Anon Ymous · Oct 19, 2009

Multiply an inch by 12 and you get a foot.
Multiply a foot by 3 and you get a yard.
Multiply a yard by 220 and you get a furlong.
Multiply a furlong by 8 and you get a mile.
Absolutely marvelous, it makes perfect sense...

(sorry, couldn't resist)

Martin Aislabie · Oct 19, 2009

Martin Reed said:
Remember Harman's target market is now the educational one, ie predominantly youthful. In todays 'Twittering' society, where 140 characters seems to be the maximum attention span, such a publication is probably no longer an effective vehicle.

That the Ilford Pro magazine made it through such a long run & was discontinued in 2003 tells it's own story, by that time it must have been getting difficult to source enough analogue orientated material to fill it properly.

Creating magazine set pieces for collectors to file, & similar one-off big promotion stuff, is like chucking mud at a wall, most of it will slide off. Harman must be capturing a lot of contacts through their lab services, and increasingly through their direct sales now, I suspect that's where their promotional efforts will be concentrated.

To elaborate on one of Martins points

If the monthly/quarterly magazine/pdf/what ever is to progress, it has to be cost effective for Ilford.

So, to reward hard work and endeavour needed to put something together on an on-going basis, how much more Ilford product are we all going to buy as a result of the monthly/quarterly magazine :confused:

Much as I would love such a magazine, I suspect from the Ilford perspective there would be lots of hard work and no significant return on sales

Martin

Bob F. · Oct 19, 2009

Anon Ymous said:
Multiply an inch by 12 and you get a foot.
Multiply a foot by 3 and you get a yard.
Multiply a yard by 220 and you get a furlong.
Multiply a furlong by 8 and you get a mile.
Absolutely marvelous, it makes perfect sense...

(sorry, couldn't resist)

Actually, it does! All these measurements correspond to a human-sized useful measurement.

Inches = first joint of a typical male thumb is useful for small measurements.
Foot (origin is obvious).
Yard = the length from your outstretched finger-tips to your nose which makes measuring lengths of cloth, rope or similar easy.
A furlong = the length of a field:
One acre = 4 rods (22 feet, a rod being 5.5' = the distance between furrows) x 1 furlong = the amount of land one man and his oxen can plough in a day.
A mile is approx 1000 strides (left+right legs).

It all makes perfect sense - on a human scale.

However, I would not want to use them to send a probe to Mars tho...

Anon Ymous · Oct 19, 2009

Bob F. said:
...However, I would not want to use them to send a man to Mars tho...

In a sense, they do, although it's obviously vague. On the other hand, once you become accustomed the meters/cm/mm/km, everything seems absolutely normal and you don't have any strange conversion factors. And trust me, everyone can get used to new metric units, I really think it's a matter of will. 12 countries changed their currencies 7 years ago...

Q.G. · Oct 19, 2009

Bob F. said:
Actually, it does! All these measurements correspond to a human-sized useful measurement. [...]

It all makes perfect sense - on a human scale.

Yes.
Take that inch, for inchstance.
The thumb has been used widely as a measure. So many different thumbs...
My atypical thumb measures 1.3", or 0.8", depending on what dimension of that thumb you would be interested in. How does your thumb measure up?

Or the foot. Whose foot would that be (and what size shoe?)?
In the Low Countries alone there were about 25 different measures called a foot.
One couldn't even agree on how many thumbs there were in a foot: anything from 10 to 13 could be o.k.

And that's not just a 'continental' thingy: it wasn't until the 1960s that the 'imperial' part of the world decided what an inch or foot should be exactly.

That's what you get when you try to make perfect sense on a human scale.

Bob F. · Oct 19, 2009

Not for me: I have always had an irrational hatred of the centimetre...

I was taught in SI units where all named units are in 10 raised to the power of multiples of three (10^-6 = micro, 10^-3 = milli, 10^3 = kilo, 10^6 = mega etc, etc (where "^" means "raised to the power of")). The centimetre (10^-2) is a fake; an imposter; an obscene aberration cobbled together because a mm is too small and a metre too large for many human-sized measurements; it is simply an attempt to invent a "metric inch" and should be banished from the face of the earth.

I cannot be having with centimetres.

I feel we may be straying slightly off-topic...

Ian Grant · Oct 19, 2009

Maybe a joint newsletter with content from all the major APUG sponsors might be more appropriate and useful. We all need the decline in film and paper sales to bottom out and analog photography to be promoted more actively.

There are major problems with the way we as film users are perceived and treated. Importers/distributors don't even list the products on their own websites in some rather large countries, no names but go south

All the main sponsors sell Internationally, even Freestyle by mail order, we need the message that film (outside 35mm consumer colour) is alive and well, that message needs to be be given to all photo stores, labs etc world-wide. 3 weeks ago I went for a battery for a light meter and the shop, a professional photography studio & minilab, asked if I could still get 120 film for my Yashicamat. That's how bad the communication gap between the film manufacturers and once retailers has become.

Many of the problems we have in today's market are because the chain between manufacturers and users has broken, only a few healthy bits survive mainly in the US & Europe.

No one company can overcome these obstacles but perhaps between them the Sponsors here could begin to put a more positive "Film is Here to Stay" message across. Ilford in particular have good links & contacts with Fuji, Freestyle, Fotoimpex (ADox), and are also partnering the Impossible project.

Food for thought

Ian

Q.G. · Oct 19, 2009

Bob F. said:
Not for me: I have always had an irrational hatred of the centimetre...

I was taught in SI units where all named units are in 10 raised to the power of multiples of three (10^-6 = micro, 10^-3 = milli, 10^3 = kilo, 10^6 = mega etc, etc (where "^" means "raised to the power of")). The centimetre (10^-2) is a fake; an imposter; an obscene aberration cobbled together because a mm is too small and a metre too large for many human-sized measurements; it is simply an attempt to invent a "metric inch" and should be banished from the face of the earth.

I cannot be having with centimetres.

I feel we may be straying slightly off-topic...

I too.

Yet ...

While the centimeter is not an SI unit (what you describe is how that works), it is as much part of the metric system as any other unit therein: 10^-2.
In the metric system, any power of 10 is o.k.

The milimeter, centimeter, meter and the kilometer are the useful units.
Other metric units make less practical sense.

dwross · Oct 19, 2009

Martin Aislabie said:
To elaborate on one of Martins points

If the monthly/quarterly magazine/pdf/what ever is to progress, it has to be cost effective for Ilford.

So, to reward hard work and endeavour needed to put something together on an on-going basis, how much more Ilford product are we all going to buy as a result of the monthly/quarterly magazine :confused:

Much as I would love such a magazine, I suspect from the Ilford perspective there would be lots of hard work and no significant return on sales

Martin

This thread is happening just as I've had something of a revelation. Darkroom know-how is disappearing even faster than I have feared. I helped another instructor teach his workshop this past weekend. The workshop was on toy camera photography and was supposed to be about the cameras and composing with them. A few years ago, the issue of what to do with the exposed film would have been incidental to the workshop. That's not true today, of course. And appreciating this newly missing link is (in my opinion) key to successfully marketing film and wet darkroom paper.

The technical magazines and newsletters of yore primarily promoted new products. Those publications recreated for today will have to go back to the beginning with the most basic of how-to articles, including building very simple (i.e. inexpensive) darkrooms. I'm not quite as pessimistic as some about the attention span of the digital youngsters contemplating 'going film', but I also don't believe many will be willing to dig through the APUG archives for gold nuggets. I fully support Ian's idea of a cooperative venture among APUG, Ilford, Silverprint and others. I don't believe the primary goal should be 'promoting' analog photography, though. It needs to go far deeper than that.

People are already interested or they aren't. The same will be true tomorrow and the day after. But, whether or not people act on that interest and commit to buying a roll of film or a box of paper will be determined by whether or not they feel they know what the heck to do the stuff once they get it home. Recognizing and addressing this basic, very real issue will be the key to generating sales for Ilford.

d

alexmacphee · Oct 19, 2009

Whatever the advantages of metric, and I admit there are many, one thing it'll never have is poetry.

Could Tennyson have written

"Two point four kilometres, two point four kilometres,
Two point four kilometres onward,
All in the Valley of Death
Rode the six hundred..."?

Would Robert Burns's beautiful love poem read one hundredth part as ravishing were it penned with the lines

"And fare thee weel, my only Luve!
And fare thee weel, awhile!
And I will come again, my Luve,
Tho' it were sixteen thousand kilometres!" ?

Does anybody say "Give him a centimetre and he'll take a metre!"? Does anyone "two-and-a-half-centimetre forward" to some destination?

Imagine Robert Frost's lovely poem rendered with the forgettable lines

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And kilometres to go before I sleep,
And kilometres to go before I sleep."

Bah, humbug! It's 'Imperial' for a reason!

Curt · Oct 19, 2009

If Harmon / Ilford could put the metric information in a newsletter it would solve many problems. They could include a basic darkroom course with the metric info.

jgjbowen · Oct 19, 2009

Perhaps a joint newsletter with Fuji and Kodak????? Ok, OK, don't you guys have a Sense of Humor?

Message for Simon of Harman/ Ilford

David A. Goldfarb

Moderator

Martin Reed

Advertiser

Mike Crawford

Tom Kershaw

Ian Grant

Martin Reed

Advertiser

Bob Carnie

Tom Kershaw

trexx

Mike Crawford

sambuff33

Steve Roberts

Q.G.

Anon Ymous

Martin Aislabie

Bob F.

Anon Ymous

Q.G.

Bob F.

Ian Grant

Q.G.

dwross

alexmacphee

Curt

jgjbowen

Message for Simon of Harman/ Ilford

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