They Took The Kodachrome Away...
 

I realize reminiscing over a film cam slide film is Geezer-like,
for many of the readers here, but Kodachrome 25 and 64,
(the ASA or ISO speed), was the pinnacle of color transparency
film, imo.

I have slides shot in the '60s and '70s, that when projected,
are knockouts, 40 yrs later.

But, it was bound to happen...
Kodak Retires Kodachrome:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/te...achrome&st=cse


Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away

YouTube - Paul Simon - Kodachrome

And, an interesting short vid of the back story of Simon's recording effort at Muscle Shoals
for the album There Goes Rhymin'Simon, on which the song was recorded:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPxQN7DVCFQ

Man I love that song!

The boy in the bubble has to be my favorite though...sorry for the hijack. :(

I also like the song.

I think the end of Kodachrome is a indication of the dying industry in the USA.

With that announcement from Kodak, I'm afraid its time to officially put my old-reliable film camera into retirement.
http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c3...onFE1981-2.jpg

http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c3...onFE1981-1.jpg

Yeah those were the days....

too bad...

What's next? Plux X and Tri X ?

Bye Bye. And my old Canon FTb...:(

Ah yes, back to the good ol' days. Unfortunately I'm not as old (physically) to remember what Kodachrome is, but I do remember putting rolls of film into the Camera. And one could choose between the different speeds (100/200/400 etc...) and different quality of the film.

I'm going to be sad when they stop selling film altogether because I really hate digital cameras. When you push the shutter on a Digicam, it does nothing until the object/person begins to move, or dies of old age.

Newer DSLR are very fast.

The shift from film to digital leads to a corresponding shift in 'shooting philosophy' (shooting style) much more radical than going from stick to auto trans.

The obvious advantage with digital is adjustable ISO - this is GOOD. With film the photographer had to decide at the onset what film speed to carry (ISO), once loaded you're stuck with it if lighting conditions change.

With digital one has a tendency to shoot a lot and sort out later - this is NOT so good. What I miss with shooting transparency or film is the self-disclipine that it imposes by pressuring the photographer "to make every shot count". You go out with a finite number of shots on fixed number of rolls, each shot equating to a fixed number of dollars. So there you are striving to shoot it right 'at the camera'... that's the test of skill and where the fun is.

I too am one of the 'old shool' guys... like to go out thinking I still have 25 exposures of Kodachrome 25 in my DSLR.

:iagree:

Very well said, imo...but, even us old school guys have flexed to shoot,
shoot, shoot, fill up the mem card, and see what we get. I have resisted
Photoshop thus far, but I am weakening. :D

I pulled out some 40 yr old KChromes the other night, from the basement,
and they still look amazing, archival-wise. I may break down and get a
bunch scanned and put to DVD or...

Shooting with KChrome 25 forced me to "look" hard, be selective, and
understand "light", as there was little inherent film speed. An amazing
product, but time waits for no one.
BR,mD

PS: I still have a roll of Kodak Ektar 25 color film in my freezer. My kids
can toss it when I croak. :D

What does DSLR stand for?

Digital Single Lens Reflex

Do we look like GOOG, here?! :rofl:

He was man enough to ask:thumbup:

:tribe:Sorry! :saad:

Hey, Matt...I was jes'poking at you. ;)

I know :D

My friends have been begging and screaming at me to move on to the 21st century.

"Whats this 'texting' business all about? You can just leave a Voicemail.........SMS isn't necessary!"

Sold my Nikon FM a few years ago - still miss it.

"Please don't take my Kodachrome away..."

A follow-up report; Kodachrome is gone.

'Digital' displaced the previous tech.
My 40 yr old 'Chromes still look like I just got them back from
the lab; I need to get them copied over to DVD or... :D

Pretty interesting read for us older readers, or those of you
curious about the previous benchmark in photography.
GL, mD

For Kodachrome Fans, Road Ends at Photo Lab in Kansas
By A. G. SULZBERGER

Published: December 29, 2010
PARSONS, Kan. — An unlikely pilgrimage is under way to Dwayne’s Photo, a small family business that has through luck and persistence become the last processor in the world of Kodachrome, the first successful color film and still the most beloved.


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Kodak stopped making Kodachrome film in 2009.


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Kodachrome rewarded generations of skilled users with a richness of color and a unique treatment of light.

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Dwayne’s Photo, in Parsons, Kan., will be processing the final rolls of it Thursday.



That celebrated 75-year run from mainstream to niche photography is scheduled to come to an end on Thursday when the last processing machine is shut down here to be sold for scrap.

In the last weeks, dozens of visitors and thousands of overnight packages have raced here, transforming this small prairie-bound city not far from the Oklahoma border for a brief time into a center of nostalgia for the days when photographs appeared not in the sterile frame of a computer screen or in a pack of flimsy prints from the local drugstore but in the warm glow of a projector pulling an image from a carousel of vivid slides.
In the span of minutes this week, two such visitors arrived. The first was a railroad worker who had driven from Arkansas to pick up 1,580 rolls of film that he had just paid $15,798 to develop. The second was an artist who had driven directly here after flying from London to Wichita, Kan., on her first trip to the United States to turn in three rolls of film and shoot five more before the processing deadline.

The artist, Aliceson Carter, 42, was incredulous as she watched the railroad worker, Jim DeNike, 53, loading a dozen boxes that contained nearly 50,000 slides into his old maroon Pontiac. He explained that every picture inside was of railroad trains and that he had borrowed money from his father’s retirement account to pay for developing them.
“That’s crazy to me,” Ms. Carter said. Then she snapped a picture of Mr. DeNike on one of her last rolls.

Demanding both to shoot and process, Kodachrome rewarded generations of skilled users with a richness of color and a unique treatment of light that many photographers described as incomparable even as they shifted to digital cameras. “Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day,” Paul Simon sang in his 1973 hit “Kodachrome,” which carried the plea “Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away.”

As news media around the world have heralded Thursday’s end of an era, rolls of the discontinued film that had been hoarded in freezers and tucked away in closets, sometimes for decades, have flooded Dwayne’s Photo, arriving from six continents.

“It’s more than a film, it’s a pop culture icon,” said Todd Gustavson, a curator from the George Eastman House, a photography museum in Rochester in the former residence of the Kodak founder. “If you were in the postwar baby boom, it was the color film, no doubt about it.”
Among the recent visitors was Steve McCurry, a photographer whose work has appeared for decades in National Geographic including his well-known cover portrait, shot in Kodachrome, of a Afghan girl that highlights what he describes as the “sublime quality” of the film. When Kodak stopped producing the film last year, the company gave him the last roll, which he hand-delivered to Parsons. “I wasn’t going to take any chances,” he explained.

At the peak, there were about 25 labs worldwide that processed Kodachrome, but the last Kodak-run facility in the United States closed several years ago, then the one in Japan and then the one in Switzerland. Since then, all that was left has been Dwayne’s Photo. Last year, Kodak stopped producing the chemicals needed to develop the film, providing the business with enough to continue processing through the end of 2010. And last week, right on schedule, the lab opened up the last canister of blue dye.
Kodak declined to comment for this article.

The status of lone survivor is a point of pride for Dwayne Steinle, who remembers being warned more than once by a Kodak representative after he opened the business more than a half-century ago that the area was too sparsely populated for the studio to succeed. It has survived in part because Mr. Steinle and his son Grant focused on lower-volume specialties — like black-and-white and print-to-print developing, and, in the early ’90s, the processing of Kodachrome.

Still, the toll of the widespread switch to digital photography has been painful for Dwayne’s, much as it has for Kodak. In the last decade, the number of employees has been cut to about 60 from 200 and digital sales now account for nearly half of revenue. Most of the staff and even the owners acknowledge that they primarily use digital cameras. “That’s what we see as the future of the business,” said Grant Steinle, who runs the business now.

The passing of Kodachrome has been much noted, from the CBS News program ”Sunday Morning” to The Irish Times, but it is noteworthy in no small part for how long it survived. Created in 1935, Kodachrome was an instant hit as the first film to effectively render color.

Even when it stopped being the default film for chronicling everyday life — thanks in part to the move to prints from slides — it continued to be the film of choice for many hobbyists and medical professionals. Dr. Bharat Nathwani, 65, a Los Angeles pathologist, lamented that he still had 400 unused rolls. “I might hold it, God willing that Kodak sees its lack of wisdom.”

This week, the employees at Dwayne’s worked at a frenetic pace, keeping a processing machine that has typically operated just a few hours a day working around the clock (one of the many notes on the lab wall reads: “I took this to a drugstore and they didn’t even know what it was”).
“We really didn’t expect it to be this crazy,” said Lanie George, who manages the Kodachrome processing department.

One of the toughest decisions was how to deal with the dozens of requests from amateurs and professionals alike to provide the last roll to be processed.

In the end, it was determined that a roll belonging to Dwayne Steinle, the owner, would be last. It took three tries to find a camera that worked. And over the course of the week he fired off shots of his house, his family and downtown Parsons. The last frame is already planned for Thursday, a picture of all the employees standing in front of Dwayne’s wearing shirts with the epitaph: “The best slide and movie film in history is now officially retired. Kodachrome: 1935-2010.”