The "Heading Back to the Future" Story

LDub's "Kodak Moment

It was an ordinary day.  Getting my camera ready for a "Kodak Moment" I'm taking this weekend of my Aunt Lois and Uncle John and their family for a 50th anniversary gift.  Have an extra battery ready for the camera, have the polarizing filter ready in case I need it, have the tripod ready in case I need a steady support and have my auxiliary flash ready in case my built-in flash isn't enough to light the portraiture.  Photography has certainly come a long way since February 1900 when Kodak declared "Any school-boy or girl can make good pictures."  This was part of an ad for the Brownie box camera they were selling.  Quite a claim for the unwieldy equipment, arcane chemistry, and extravagant expense of 19th century photography.  Granted, the camera sold for only $1 and was preloaded with film, but could certainly come no where close to the professional equipment and quality of today.  What Kodak did manage to do was nurture photography as a social activity.  They sold 150,000 Brownies in that first year and within a decade nearly a third of Americans owned a camera.  The Kodak mania only intensified when they introduced a folding pocket model that could print photos directly onto penny postcards.  More than 677 million postcards were mailed in 1907.  Shared experiences no longer had to be experienced together.  Pretty neat, huh.  The world today is going through another "Kodak Moment" with the cell phone camera.  The quality you can achieve with the iPhone camera certainly isn't as good as my DSLR camera, but that is secondary to the social aspect of instant communication much the same way as it was in the early 1900s with the Brownie.  The free app Instagram doubled its audience to 27 million users in the first three months of 2012, thus facilitating effortless sharing of images.  Instagram is a full-fledged social network with users sharing and commenting on one another's images.  Photos are the quickest way to grasp information and I suspect George Eastman realized that when he developed the Brownie camera.  It's been said that our brains have evolved to be more than 30% visual cortex.  Even in Afghanistan, our soldiers are using smartphone photography to communicate memories back home.  Do you think Eastman had any idea that photography would be as social as it is today?  In 1975 a Kodak engineer by the name of Steve Sasson build the world's first portable digital camera by using parts from a Super-8 movie camera and a cassette player.  Colleagues wondered who would want to look at photos on a TV.  That was as far as Kodak progressed in the photography field.  The company that was an innovator for over a century got stuck in the status quo and today stands for nostalgia.  My gosh, there is even an app that can take digital photos and make them look like they were shot with a Brownie.  Taking us back to the the future!  Will it never end?  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.