My impression is that quite a few of the more prolific posters bailed out after Kevin Raber was ousted. I know some of them have returned, but the dynamic that generated the lengthier discussion threads seems to have dissipated. Also, Michael Reichmann and, later, Kevin helped keep the discussions going—both with their own forum contributions and with occasional video presentations.
Well yes, I remember Michael chipping in now and again, but I seem to remember him as being a little removed from actual conversations once he’d kicked the ball into action. However, that kick did provide the impetus or, rather, raw material for the interchanges of opinion. That said, it’s not as if new editorial material doesn’t still arrive too.
It might well be that LuLa is suffering from the effect of a narrow reader base combined with the fact that digital photography is hardly news anymore.
I bumped into a website today that promotes film photography: the chap running it was doing a news feature on Kodak and the new/repackaged/rebranded materials they are promoting. The Italian firm Ferrania is back in action too… I was quite surprised at the cost of film today. Unless one has a darkroom, or at least easy access to one, film photography strikes me as quite pointless: to each film one then has to add developing and, unless scanning is possible at home, the cost of turning those negatives into files. If files are not required, wet printing in mind, then the cost of papers and yet more chemicals has to be added… a very expensive game, today. If external companies are going to do the printing, then it seems to me that actual photography has already left the building, as it were. Having other bodies do the printing was okay if the photographer was just too busy to do it himself, but if he simply isn’t interested, then he has turned his back on a crucial part of what his image can be, handing the end result to somebody else to own. I am aware that my thoughts on wet photography costs are purely my own, based on what I feel to be reasonable, but even so, as a friend once remarked, how expensive can the best steak be before you’re just getting taken for a ride?
Actually, I have doubts about the value of printing at all. If you are able to turn prints into a viable business, great - I doff my cap to you; short of that, the only prints that matter to me today are those rare ones of family members no longer here. I have boxes of A3+ prints that I now only visit if somebody in the family wants one for their wall. For myself, I prefer simply to look for them on my website, which is the repository for whatever I do these past few years. No longer that job of putting them all back into their boxes and forgetting which should be where; for a while, there was a system ;-) but it fell by the wayside pretty quickly. So easy just to shut the site down when I have satisfied my curiosity, and look at something else. LuLa, for example.
