The New Fomatone 532

There are more funerals than christenings in photo materials, and it's a rarity for there to be a new black & white photo paper - when it happens, & it's a good one there's cause for serious celebration. This is the replacement for a discontinued Foma paper, Fomatone 'Nature', which became unavailable when the base paper was discontinued. Foma now have a new base paper; the paper is still branded 'Nature' but the code is now 532 ll. Although still using the warm Fomatone chloro-bromide emulsion the paper surface is quite different from it's predecessor, and we consider it now occupies a unique and valuable niche. The previous base had a significant texture, and was approaching matt. The new one is smoother, with a high degree of surface sheen, warm-tone with dense blacks. Visually it can be considered a smooth lustre finish, and can be used as an alternative to 'glossy unglazed'. Sizes are 9.5x12", 12x16", 16x20", and 20x24". The weight is 245gsm, the tint a natural white, ie slightly warm to complement the emulsion.

Pictures are;
Top - straight print in warm developer angled to show the surface sheen.
Left - the same print scanned, Neutol WA developer for normal time.
Below - both light & heavy lith prints using Fotospeed lith developer.

POLAROID - END OF AN ERA

Even Polaroid's own website confirms that manufacture of the wide variety of Polaroid instant films is winding up during 2008. The last coating of the professional pack films are taking place in the first months of the year, and with normal consumption turnaround will have reached their final rest in the market place by the end of the year.

The saddest aspect of this is the loss of the largest part of the legacy of Edwin Land. In a life combining ferocious scientific research with extraordinary entrepreneurial genius Land altered the photographic landscape in all areas from artistic to industrial.

From the first sepia black and white peel-apart in 1948, through the intensive effort to move this forward into peel-apart colour, Land rode a wave of innovation coupled with successful marketing that made Polaroid a household name. Originally set up to market Land's polarising screen material, the pinnacle was achieved in 1972 with the successful placement of SX70, the first fully encapsulated one-step colour print material.

The success of instant photography paved the way for the takeup of the digital chip into imaging territory, and Land's major failure, the launch of Polavision in 1978 signalled the start of this crossover. Polavision was an 8mm additive cine process, which had to be processed within it's viewer. The film & equipment was expensive, the film could not be edited, and there was no sound capability. Polavision completely bombed, and out of 200,000 sets manufactured, maybe only 60,000 were sold, into a marketplace which was just starting to receive VHS video equipment. Land was asked to leave his own company. The wave that had carried Polaroid for decades was beginning to subside, and by the time Land died in 1991 Intel was starting to use his own techniques for achieving supremecy in microprocessor chip-building.

So this year clean the rollers in your Polaroid back, and shoot some frames of Polaroid film, in salutation to the passing of the work of Edwin Land - a scientist & entrepreneur who probably did more in one life to wrest the seemingly impossible from the remarkable silver halides than any other innovator in the history of photography.