For all of you OLD photographers out there...

shack

Paul Simon....the prophet...

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

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If any of you ever used Kodachrome film like I did...the following story may interest you.


Read the story, listen to the interview and look at the photos.


I want to see what is on....THE LAST ROLL OF KODACHROME:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2010/07/23/128728114/kodachrome

TNRabbit

Cool! That will be an interesting story....

george daniel

Thanks for the link--one of the most enjoyable and informative stories in a long time--Steve,, thanks for posting that.IIRC--the Afghan girl was "re-found" awhile back?

shack

george daniel wrote:

Thanks for the link--one of the most enjoyable and informative stories in a long time--Steve,, thanks for posting that.IIRC--the Afghan girl was "re-found" awhile back?

You are correct.

The photos...




The story...

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2002/04/afghan-girl/index-text

audiobliss

Aww, that's sad. The beginning of the story had me wanting to go out and use some Kodachrome - I never have - and then it didn't even let me down easy breaking my heart.

Cool story, though.

shack

audiobliss wrote:

Aww, that's sad. The beginning of the story had me wanting to go out and use some Kodachrome - I never have - and then it didn't even let me down easy breaking my heart.

If you ever get the urge to shoot film...Velvia 100 by Fujifilm is the way to go.

Many nature photographers started using Velvia 50 as a replacement for Kodachrome 25...but it too ceased production in 2005.

audiobliss

Thanks for the info. It's been quite a while since I used any film. I dabbled in it a while back, had some fun, but then got out of it. Still have access to the cameras back home, though, so maybe I'll start playing with it again one day.

audiobliss

Reading through that article it mentioned how the last place in the country that processes Kodachrome is closing down. I have no idea what the differences in film are or what Kodachrome is like, but I know several hardcore enthusiasts process their own film. Is that not feasible with Kodachrome, say if someone were to still have a few rolls waiting to be used up?

shack

audiobliss wrote:

Reading through that article it mentioned how the last place in the country that processes Kodachrome is closing down. I have no idea what the differences in film are or what Kodachrome is like, but I know several hardcore enthusiasts process their own film. Is that not feasible with Kodachrome, say if someone were to still have a few rolls waiting to be used up?

Probably not. Developing Kodachrome film is a complex process. It requires technicians with extensive chemistry training and a very large, difficult machine...not the sort of thing that can be done in a home developing setup.

The place is not shutting down...just no longer developing Kodachrome.

audiobliss

Ahh, nice correction. Didn't mean to imply they were going out of business, though that's exactly what I said, haha.

That is a shame there won't really be any alternatives for processing Kodachrome, though I guess it really is a moot point if they're not producing it anymore. I was just curious.

Thanks!

Gadabout

Shack ....

Was the Velvia 50 red biased as was Kodachrome? I never tried it. I always liked the Fujichrome, especially for blues and greens. While 35mm photography is pretty rare now a days, it's even rarer for people to shoot slides.

With few exceptions, I prefered shooting slides to prints. The article brought back fond memories. Guess I need to break out the 35mm, and go see what I can see.

Thanx for the link,
Scott

shack

Gadabout wrote:

Shack ....

Was the Velvia 50 red biased as was Kodachrome? I never tried it. I always liked the Fujichrome, especially for blues and greens.

Yes. Velvia adds red to warm colors. Yellows become slightly redder, oranges turn toward red and skin gets ruddy. This bias is what gave Velvia its extraordinarily great look for landscapes and nature as it tended to really warm up early morning and late evening light.

And to clairify, I referring to the original Velvia which was a ISO 50 film but did not actually have "50" in it's name. It was first made in 1990 and they quit making it in 2005. They later replace it with a "Velvia 50" that removed the red bias.

dee1949

....The good ole days. Nikon FTN and a Nikkormat EL - Black bodies of course. Slew of lenses weighing a ton. Still have them tucked away somewhere. Only shot B&W film....Color was always Kodachrome or Ektachrome for speed. Kids today probably don't even know what a slide projector is. When I got back from Europe, in my youth, I would project my slides of my favorite hangouts on a wall and get "WASTED".

shack

This is my last film body camera...A Minolta SRTSC II. This camera took great photos. I still have it...I just don't use it.

I wish they had been able to hang around in the world of digital rather than be absorbed by Sony.

cristo

Still using film cameras -

Workhorse is a Fuji GS645S medium format rangefinder - small, light, and sharp, but limited to one semi-wide angle lens.
Transperencies taken with 120 or 220 size Kodachrome 25 and 64 with it were pretty impressive
back when you could still buy and process it.

Also have some Canon manual focus cameras and lenses - mostly use a trusty A-1 Program with either
a 24/2.8, 85/1.8, or 135/2.8 lens.

My wife has a digital Canon SD950 IS, though.

kuntasensei

When I was a kid, my dad converted our spare bedroom into a darkroom. I spent my youth learning how to process film and do prints. It's sad to think that this generation is pretty much the last that will have had that experience.

danger boy

thanks for posting the cool link and video clip. great stuff.

back in the day.. I used Kodachrome 200, 64 and 25 ASA
25 was my fave.. amazing color and such fine detail with little grain at all.

danger boy

cristo wrote: »

Still using film cameras -
Also have some Canon manual focus cameras and lenses - mostly use a trusty A-1 Program with either
a 24/2.8, 85/1.8, or 135/2.8 lens.

My wife has a digital Canon SD950 IS, though.

How do you like your Canon A1? I had one back when I was in high school.. it got me through my junior and senior year taking photographs for the school yearbook.

The Canon A1 was way a head of it's time for ease of use... i mean.. it could be 100% automatic, (except for focus, because auto focus had not been invented yet)... to 100% manual. Loved the camera.. had it for 20 years and it still worked when I sold it on Ebay about 8 years ago with a 50/f1.4 lens and a 135/2.5 lens. It did not suffer from the annoying dry shutter click that so many others developed.

thing I hated about it though.. once the battery went dead.... so was the camera. :eek:

cristo

danger boy wrote: »

How do you like your Canon A1? I had one back when I was in high school.. it got me through my junior and senior year taking photographs for the school yearbook.

The Canon A1 was way a head of it's time for ease of use... i mean.. it could be 100% automatic, (except for focus, because auto focus had not been invented yet)... to 100% manual. Loved the camera.. had it for 20 years and it still worked when I sold it on Ebay about 8 years ago with a 50/f1.4 lens and a 135/2.5 lens. It did not suffer from the annoying dry shutter click that so many others developed.

thing I hated about it though.. once the battery went dead.... so was the camera. :eek:

I bought the A1 from my younger brother about 25 years ago. It's a great camera.
It does have a little of the dry shutter click even though I had it
CLA'd (clean, lubricate, adjust) once to tone it down.
Also have a AE-1 Program, an FT-B, a couple old folding Voigtlander Bessa and Bessa I medium format cameras,
and a Minolta Weathermatic for snorkeling.

mhardy6647

you all might enjoy leafing through this vintage/film camera thread at AK:
http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/showthread.php?t=172605
(although some attachments won't be visible unless one is logged in)

shack

Today is the day....

The last roll of Kodachrome will be developed...and we know what is on it.

It's a roll of film with pictures of the home, family, business employees and the small Midwestern town where he lives taken by Dwayne Steinle, the owner of the photo lab developing the film.

In the end the photos will not be epic shots taken in an exotic location by a world famous photographer...but just everyday snapshots taken by an average guy.

In a way...it is very fitting. Because really...that is what most of the photos on Kodachrome were all about. Just everyday life.

Goodbye Kodachrome.

Here's looking at you, kid!

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.

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.”


A version of this article appeared in print on December 30, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition..

jflail2

What a wonderfully nostalgic story Shack; thanks for posting that. My first camera was a little 110; I was never allowed to touch my dad's much nicer 35MM.

Polaroids and kodachrome gone; the end of an era for sure...

stuwee

:frown: :frown: :frown:

What a shame, there was nothing like manipulating the light with Kodachrome, made you feel like a pro even if you weren't. Digital takes all the fun out of it now, just like it does with music.....

billbillw

Shack, If you read the article carefully, it seems that the 'last roll' developed is not the same as the 'last roll' produced that was given to McCurry (the National Geographic photographer).

This article explains it more and includes some of McCurry's images:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2010/12/30/132474928/kodachrome

shack

stuwee wrote: »

:frown: :frown: :frown:

What a shame, there was nothing like manipulating the light with Kodachrome, made you feel like a pro even if you weren't. Digital takes all the fun out of it now, just like it does with music.....

Not for me. I'm enjoying photography even more now than ever before. Film was cool...digital is way better IMO. I've scanned an converted a lot of my 35mm slides and negatives to digital. It has opened up a whole new realm of photography for me.

Film is still around...although it is harder and harder to find. Maybe like vinyl...it will make a resurgence...but I'm never looking back.

billbillw

shack wrote: »

Not for me. I'm enjoying photography even more now than ever before. Film was cool...digital is way better IMO. I've scanned an converted a lot of my 35mm slides and negatives to digital. It has opened up a whole new realm of photography for me.

Film is still around...although it is harder and harder to find. Maybe like vinyl...it will make a resurgence...but I'm never looking back.

I'm with you there too. I'd given up on serious photography because I was frustrated with film and not being able to see your mistakes until after processing. Last year, I got back into SLR work with my Pentax K100D and a handful of lenses. Upgraded again recently to a K20D which I will stick with for at least a few years.

Digital has many limitations (not the least of which is limited dynamic range), but it is so flexible, it allows you to capture shots you wouldn't be able to get on a film camera, or at least not without changing the film inside.

sucks2beme

I spent a number of years working at the place that made it.
Another victim of marching technology. They helped pioneer
modern photography in both film and digital formats.
It's a shame they never mastered the art of electronics.

george daniel

“Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away”

shack

sucks2beme wrote:

It's a shame they never mastered the art of electronics.

In the early to mid 90s, Kodak made some pretty good digital cameras...mainly P&S. Their easy share system was (like the name implied) very easy to use for sending pictures by email and posting on the web or downloading into your computer. They had a cool printer that made nice 4x6 prints right out of the camera. They sort of had the early digital point and shoot market figured our. BUT...as little cameras got more sophisticated with better sensors and electronics in addition to video and HD video...Kodak fell behind the likes of Canon, Nikon Panasonic, Sony, etc. The smart phone camera has taken the place of their easy share system. Plus Kodak did not have the high end technology from the DSLR products to trickle down into their P&S like Nikon, Canon and Sony. Kodak hit a wall. I hope they figure it out. Kodak knows photography...they just need to find a way to compete in todays market.

nadams

sucks2beme wrote: »

It's a shame they never mastered the art of electronics.

I still shoot with a DX7590. It's about 6 years old, and is still running on the original battery. Can take a full card's worth of pics without recharging...