"Mama Don't Take My Kodachrome Away"

This week the Eastman Kodak Company announced the end of Kodachrome. Kodachrome film was introduced in 1936 as the first successful color film. In 1986, my wife and I attended a celebration in Rochester, NY marking the 50th anniversary of the introduction. 1936-2009, 73 years is a good run for any product.

I shot my first roll of Kodachrome in about 1960 and carried on a love/hate relationship with it for the next 35 years. Its color was garish, the exposure was ultra-critical, and the processing extremely specialized, but it was still the best color film we had for many years.

I have slide cabinets full of gorgeous Kodachrome slides made primarily in the 70’s and 80’s. But I have also thrown away thousands of slides that were over or (mainly) under-exposed. Getting the exposure right was a real pain, and you never knew how you did until, a few days later, when the little yellow boxes came back from the Kodak labs in New York, Chicago, or Dallas.

Bracketing, which is a technique of shooting various exposures of the same subject to make sure that you have one at the correct exposure, became routine among pros using Kodachrome.

This week I sold two slide projectors and 25 slide trays on Craig’s List. I kept back one projector and two trays just in case I ever needed them. But, basically it is the end of an era. Digital imaging is clearly superior as far as I am concerned. (The only down sides are questions of archiving and the fact that the quality of the image of digital projectors are not yet as good as projecting a Kodachrome slide with a professional slide projector.)

Kodachrome is now part of our heritage. In the future us old-time photographers will set around old-folks homes and talk about our struggles and victories with Kodachrome and its much maligned brother, Ektachrome. I am looking forward to it. I have the slides to back up my war stories.