RIP Kodachrome

mshilarious

mshilarious

Banned
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/us/30film.html

The best film ever. In the '90s you could tell who the pikers were because they all switched to Velvia. People forgot that Kodachrome was a saturated film, which made "all the world a sunny day." Hence, the ridiculously saturated Velvia made all the world a post-nuclear apocalypse on Jupiter :rolleyes:

Anyway, Kodachrome, how did I love thee; let me count the ways:

K25: Hands down, best film ever for landscapes. Jaw-dropping detail. Made you never want to project a slide, but instead spend money on the best 10x or even 30x loupe you could afford--if your lens was up to par. A Nikon 24mm at f/11 and K25, and you ruled the world . . .

K64: I shot more of this than anything. Not quite K25, but sometimes you couldn't carry a tripod.

K200: pushed a stop, the best astrophotography film ever. No, I don't want to hear about Scotchchome 400, it was grainy and hard to find. K200 was the best compromise in sharpness with good sky color, even in light-polluted locales.
 
Loved me some K64, though I did flirt briefly with Velvia and the other Fujichromes, and shot a lot of E100S as well.. Nothing rendered color more accurately than K64 - even K25 sometimes shifted color. K200 was too grainy for my taste (I never shot astral photography, and it was easier to push 100 ISO E6 if I needed something faster).
My favorite thing was finding old boxes of slides from the 40s and 50s. If they were K14 (or even K22), they looked like they were shot yesterday. If they were early E6, they'd be faded to magenta or blue. But those Kodachromes so beautifully caught the details and the colors - I'll miss it. Of course, developing K14 was a 27 step process that produced toxic gases, so it lost a lot of favor to E6, which could be done fairly simply in less than 3 hours at almost any photofinisher. But there was nothing like the color of Kodachrome, and as somebody who was thinking about accuracy of color, and archival stability, it was a great tool that will be greatly missed.
 
Digital format has all but taken over everywhere. In colleges (even art colleges) they are closing down darkrooms in favor of digital processing and editing. It is a bit of a shame because since the development of photosensitive chemicals in the early 19th century and then color processing in the 20th century photographers were always fighting the battle of fugitive colors on their prints. Some resorted to photo silk screening with permanent pigments in place of the fugitive dyes in photo processing and now they can be reproduced as giclee's with permanent pigments. There is a character to digital photography as there is to film photography, but to the general public all that is cared about is an image. We are a fickle society. In my life-time as a visual artist I have seen many changes. I used to make a fairly good living as an illustrator and commercial artist and now the pay has dropped substantially in favor of very easy to achieve digital program mouse jockeys that can't draw worth a lick. I am a college art professor and I have to responsibly advise my students to become adept and up-to-date with all of the digital formats if they ever want to make a living. I had to learn all of them and I keep up to date with them, but I refuse to sign my name to any job that I've done electronically because it's not really art........ it's programming.

Film photography will all but disappear in the next few decades to be practiced by only a staunch few that enjoy the "older craft" just like the few that still do work with silver prints and mercury prints today. That's just the way of our world.

I confess that I'm somewhat enjoying this whole thing because I had to fight the good fight for many years against photographers in art departments that wanted to do away with drawing and painting classes because so many more students were interested in photography and we would argue that just because there is an interest in one media doesn't mean that we should abandon another. We almost lost that battle but we did take a big hit. Now I'm hearing the same argument coming from the same mouths that wanted to do away with drawing and painting classes, and forgive me, but it makes me chuckle to myself a bit. :)

You're just going to have to learn to live with the changes or else you'll turn into one of those bitter old dinosaurs that complain about everything. Just wait. Soon the newer digital formats will be replaced by another format (only time will tell) and you'll hear all of the digi-heads complaining about the abandonment of their precious format and then you'll see it. And just maybe,........... you can also chuckle about it a little.
 
Digital cameras should be cool, but unfortunately most seem to be designed by the same idiots who do remote controls.

E6, I started with it but when I switched to K64 I never went back. I can't even look at my E6 slides now, I hate them. In the end, I'd moved to negative film--a sin, I know--but Portra 160NC was also a really excellent film.

Nikon FM2 + K25 = bliss. Don't need no batteries to take no picture :cool:

Except it's a giant pain in the ass to be in the right spot at the right time, so I traded for electronics as a hobby. My bags of components are usually where I expect them to be . . . :)

But I wish I still had a film scanner, I'd break out some of those K-Chromes in remembrance . . . :(
 
I bought three rolls of K64 earlier this year and shot one of them on my honeymoon during the summer. The 2nd roll I used to shoot my 4 year son's Christmas. I wanted shots of him on Kodachrome before it disappeared forever. The third roll, well, I guess I'm SOL since it's still sitting untouched on my shelf.

I have thought about going digital, but I can't bring myself to go to a format where one is so tempted to "play" with an image to make it "perfect". That was part of the art of photography; trying to capture the image "perfectly" on the film.

I've shot a few rolls of Velvia during the mid-90's but wasn't all that impressed with it. I tried all kinds of films and chromes in the 90s; Kodak, Fuji, Agfa (very underrated on some films!), and Scotch. I found myself going back to Kodachrome unless I was shooting a wedding, then it went to Fuji Reala (do they still make that?).

So for the meantime, I'll stick with my trusty Nikon FE, 8008s, and N90s. I'd love to get my hands on a F4 in excellent condition though. That was always what I had an erection for. LOL

It's sad to see an icon fall into the footnotes of history. At least there is still a handful of choices for film and chromes to use.

RIP Kodachrome...
 
Film is still used for cinema films, but for how much longer? I love film because I have an analogue mind. I like pictures on a strip of plastic, and I like a wiggley line down the edge of the film for the soundtrack. A few years ago I designed a system for producing variable-area soundtracks on 16mm film with no moving parts (except the film). It had 40 LEDs filed down thin and stacked in a row behind a fine slit, the image of the slit was focussed on the edge of the film, and the LEDs faded on one after another to give the variable width slit of light. I got response to 10kHz out of it. All for my own amusement, I didn't make any money from it.
 
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