I’m currently working on the island of Oahu, Hawaii and finally got a day off to be a tourist. A friend of mine in Seattle was part owner of a record store here so I went into Honolulu today to check it out. He recently sold his share of the store to his partner since he is staying in Seattle full time now. This is the store:
[http://hungryear.comhttp://hungryear.com[/url]. They just moved to a new location in the heart of downtown.
To my surprise there’s a camera store next door that deals almost exclusively in film. I packed 5 rolls of film thinking it would be hard to find other than the occasional roll of Fujifilm 400 at the drugstore. They had a pretty good selection of 135, 120, Polaroid, Instax, bulk film and disposable cameras. They had color, Velvia slide film, black and white, Kodak, Fuji, Cinestill, Ilford, Fuji FP100-C... They also had a nice selection of cameras including several Canon AE-1’s, a nice looking Leica M3, and 3 different Nikonos underwater cameras. The young Hawaiian girl behind the counter was quite knowledgeable about what she was selling and seemed genuinely excited about talking about it. As you can see from the photo they also listen to records on a record player purchased next door. This is a link to the stores web site:
http://treehouse-shop.com/. There's also a photo lab that's still in business here
https://www.hawaiipacificphoto.net/. It's nice to see a store that is dedicated to film unlike the rare camera stores that sells it off in the corner as a small side business.
Selling film was a big deal in Hawaii, Kodak invested a lot into marketing to tourists here. If you haven’t heard of the Kodak hula shows it’s a part of Hawaiian history.
http://www.hawaiihistory.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ig.page&PageID=493. Google the Kodak hula show and you’ll find plenty of old photos and 8mm and Super 8 movies. They held the show during daylight so people could photograph it with lots of bright colors that screamed for Kodachrome.
