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Bak 2 Skool 8: Cameras

We have a strict policy on not accepting compilation DVDs in exchange for passing grades.

It must have been really fun being in school with Dan Ryckert. Now we'll all know what it's like, for better or worse!

Oct. 8 2021

Cast: JERF

Posted by: Jan

In This Episode:

Camera

27 Comments

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BisonHero

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Edited By BisonHero

Really curious whether this episode is actually about cameras, or ends up being about optics and light and vision in general.

Edit: it was pretty much cameras! Man, I would give anything for a Bak 2 School: Light with both Dan & Paul. It would be “wait, pause pause pause” every 10 seconds.

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Murmur

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Dan not understanding what aftercare is doesn't surprise me one bit.

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FotoGi

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as a "photo guy" i can tell this will end up bein my fav ep of the series.... i know dan has to have some gold on this one.

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Katerpilet

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The lack of Eastman-Kodak's ability to innovate destroyed the company which was one of the larger employers in the Rochester region, so it actually caused a big economic issue for the region. The film resurgence hasn't really totally reinvigorated the company either.

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sluggdiddy

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Pharmacies did indeed develop the film in house. There was a big machine that would develop the pictures. I imagine it started there because of the chemicals involved or something like that. My friend worked the developing machine at the local grocery store pharmacy in about 2000-2002. He came across a LOT of naked pictures, they had to view each picture to make sure it developed correctly.

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tartyron

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It's Jeffinitely been a godDan pleasure.


This wasn't the funniest episode, but I loved it all the same. I was luck to have been able to take the last 2 years of college with part time photography classes on top of my normal coursework. It was a whim that I fell in absolute love with and my school had a fully featured darkroom. And this was 2006 or so, film was on it's way out, but it was in that Goldilocks zone of being obsolete but still cheap because there was still so much supply, so it was relatively cheap to grab an ancient camera and B&W film. I spend hours and hours every week in that darkroom, playing with rolls and rolls of film I shot all over the region and people around my town, a lot of whom I convinced to come to the school studio where I could play with total control of the light. I was never particularly good or naturally talented at making amazing pictures, but the process of making even the total crap was so enjoyable and meditative, I've never found a hobby to match it since. when I graduated and moved abroad, I just couldn't get access to a darkroom anywhere I was, and digital photography just never felt the same. I continued to shoot in digital, but without the darkroom the thrill just wasn't there like it used to be. Finally, around 2013 or so, I had a catastrophic hard drive failure and I lost years and years worth of my digital photos, effectively erasing 6 years of my life other than some bits I had posted on facebook. After that, I really never pulled my DSLR out again.

This was a pleasure to watch, so much so I feel kind inspired to dust off the old girl. I know that digital can't ever be what film was, and that film dead decades ago at this point, but maybe I could work up a little spark.

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SchrodngrsFalco

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Edited By SchrodngrsFalco

lmfao Bakalar's background has "chalk," on the whiteboard in place of his cut off boom mic arm lol

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pikapomelo

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If anything, Jeff is getting better at saying, "I don't know".

Thanks.

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Outrager

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My dad owned a 1 hour photo place so I don't think I even knew you could go to a pharmacy or supermarket to get film developed since he would do it for us. The machines were huge and it was fun watching the photos go along the conveyor belt. I didn't see any nudes when I was there on the weekends, but did see a lot of photos of movie posters for the people making bootleg movies to sell on the street.

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MunnyShh

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Great and fun episode! More tech would be fun too. Like how sound works + speakers and microphones. or CPU vs GPU & HDD/SSD vs RAM memory.

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badsmalltalker

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So “bokeh” isn’t just the out of focus parts of an close-up image. It’s quality of what those out of focus parts look like. Depending on specific qualities like what the camera’s aperture looks like (for instance, how many blades it is made of), the out of focus details can look purely round, diamond shaped, square shaped, etc. It’s unique to the equipment being used and that’s why photography people sometimes make a whole thing about it.

Just some extra info that was slightly glossed over in this episode. 🙂

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Dareitus

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Developing photos was always done in-house, even in those tiny little booths as far back as canister film rolls of film and disposable cameras. The roll is dropped into a machine that can extract the film, drag it through two different chemical baths, and dry/develop the negative in a few seconds. (As far back as the early 2000s they'd also scan the negatives into a digital system).

Back before digital the negative machine would spit out the negatives and you load those into a scanner/printer device. Nowadays its all in one and converts them to digital along the way with automated photoshop type stuff removing redeye and what not.

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dya

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Edited By dya

Hey Jeff, I worked in film development at Walgreens back in the early 00s. We had a big ass machine where we developed film there, took about 20 minutes. Maybe in the 90s they sent things out, but not once the machines came around. They did the transfer to paper, too.

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SkyJW94

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To answer a question about how well young people understand film or are aware of film, I just turned 27 and I've been aware of film and how it works since at least middle school, if not sometime in elementary school. And I think film will still have a presence even within youth culture for two reason:

1. The photography community. There are a LOT of younger people who are very into photography, even if it's very amateur photography you just shoot with a smartphone. But I think the rise of Instagram and other social media sites also led to a lot of people getting into photography more seriously and people like my sister (who is just about to turn 26) have gotten really into using classic film cameras and polaroid film cameras. You can find groups of younger people, especially in college, who love that kind of stuff and even when I was in high school in the early 2010s people in photography classes were very into using film.

2. The film community. For a lot of similar reasons as the photography, younger people who are into filmmaking or just really love movies are pretty aware of film as a medium for making movies. That was my avenue to understanding film and there are plenty of directors who use film to makes movies, with 70mm film being treated like the holy grail of film due to its ability to capture really vivid colors, high resolution, and ability to be projected on exceptionally large screens without losing visual fidelity. And I think a lot of younger cinephiles also do go back and watch older films that were on film and can understand what the movies were shot on and how the film was processed.

And ultimately I think there's just a nostalgic appreciation for film and also a fondness for the tactile nature of it which you just don't get with digital photography. You can obviously get digital photographs developed and have a physical copy of it, but there's something about a camera with film in it which you can pull out and see the individual frames of or a camera that produces a polaroid you can hold in your hand that has a certain appeal for a lot of people. It's just one of those things which found a kind of second life among a certain group of younger people who almost romanticize that way of putting images to film.

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catstrphx

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my la gear lights got me kicked out of vietnam

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scoutnagnets

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This series kicks ass, great job Jeff and Dan.

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MaikeruWiruson

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Best outro yet. Really caught me off guard 😂

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emphulio

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Great episode and nice to see you again Paul!

Jan, I've been enjoying your edits a lot, throughout the series, not just here!

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sebconn

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I always though making a pinhole camera was a rite of passage when you went to high school.

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larmer

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Edited By larmer

I feel like the concept of camera obscura was passed by too quickly here, especially in the video material they were watching. It's crazy that way back then some human discovered that a small hole in a box or a room will take in light in such a way that it projects an upside down image on the rear wall, and all these years later we are still utilizing that same principal but have just found ways to manipulate the light with lenses and place different materials on the rear wall to capture the upside down projection.

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Slow_pC

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Dan , I want a free toaster please.

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rlatham

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Talk about feeling old. I remember going to Walgreens in the 70s with my dad and testing the tubes for our console tv.

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TheOnlyHighlander

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"Have to take some kind of test, probably, to get that!"

Lol, love it. Dan you're the best

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RobertForster

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Film is still better than digital in terms of quality. Digital is just for convenience.

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janman

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janman  Staff

You know, I don't think Jeff is an accredited molecular biologist.

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therusseller

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"So he's cheating" says the man who changed his class grade from an F to an A with one DVD. I love you Dan, but maaaaaaaaaaaaan

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Aarglefarg

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A neat coincidence about the documentary Tim's Vermeer referenced in this episode: the titular Tim (Jenison) invented the Tricaster.