OK! This has been echoed around the blogsphere, so I might as well add my nostalgic 2 cents worth in. Heck, Paul Simon even made a song about the stuff and he mentions Nikon cameras as well 
The man had taste!
Rob Terry also dropped me a note inside one of the comments. I have fond memories of Kodachrome. When shooting slides, it was my film of choice. I have always liked very slow speed, fine grained film and Kodachrome certainly fit the bill in that respect. ASA 25! Sweet. That’s why I shoot Ilford Pan F, ISO 50.
I remember that you could drop of a roll of Kodachrome at the drug store and have it back within about a week. It was a seriously complex product to develop and, from what I understand, to manufacture. I’d like to get my paws on a few rolls of 120 sized Kodachrome. Nothing beat this stuff for color saturation and warm tones. Fujichrome was great for the cooler tones, greens and blues, but I still really enjoyed this stuff!
A force of one
As a matter of fact, the film is so complex and probably costly to process that there is but one lab remaining in the WORLD that processes it and they will cease processing at the end of 2010. So, if you have a few rolls of the stuff stockpiled, you’d better start shooting and get it developed. It’s officially a dinosaur! So, head on over to Dwayne’s and get your Kodachrome developed!
Anyone else here old enough or been involved long enough to have shot Kodachrome? Do you remember the song? I’ll add a picture later! It won’t be a Kodachrome picture, but it will be a picture nonetheless. I’m not at my laptop at the moment! 
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12 Responses to “Momma don’t take my Kodachrome away!”
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paul
Old enough? You bet! Started shooting Kodachrome back in 1953, when it was asa 10 – that’s right, ten. And my little German Wirgin 35mm had neither a meter or a range finder. Sunny 16 was the rule, and I had to guess the range and set it in on the lens, which was mounted in a Prontor-S shutter, manual cock and trip. Yeah, I’m “geezing”. I tend to do that these days.
Kodachrome was my film of choice for many years, probably till about the early 1990s, when I began to shift over to Fujichrome because of improvements in processing. Kodachrome processing plants were even then starting to disappear. I really liked K-25, then K-64, even though it had limited dynamic range. I liked the warm, saturated colors back then. My tastes have evolved, however, and I don’t much go for the saturation we find nowadays, both in film and digital sensors. In fact, the first thing I do with an image nowadays, whether a film scan or a digital image, is convert it to black & white – that is, unless it’s an obvious color image, e.g. a flower, or a hummingbird. Those things pretty much demand color, don’t they? Nowadays I shoot Astia when I shoot color transparencies, and Portra NC when I shoot color negatives. I have found that Portra NC, processed in the digital ‘darkroom’ has much more natural colors. Even then, I’ll often subdue those colors a little.
My tastes are reflected in my work, so please visit my web site. Nope, no blog. I’m satisfied reading those created by others, and I find few that are worthy of the time. Yours is one of those in the worthy category.
Oh, and BTW, Paul Simon is a mere child – a very talented child, however, and I like his music. I tend to like the older guys, like Bach and Dvorak.
Cheers, adam
Paul,
without wanting to spoil anybody’s fun, but I don’t get it. At the moment everybody and their uncle blog how great film is. Nope, not for me. Never was.
Really, how many people had private darkrooms? I certainly not. I probably would have liked to dabble in photography, but it didn’t happen until digital was here. Finally I had perfect control about the whole process, every possibility to be creative, and all that with only what today everybody has anyway: a computer.
And then the negatives! What a mess! Compare that to the perfect order on a nice little hard drive
Slides! Even worse! You couldn’t even look at them without a projector and a screen in a darkened room, and all that was so tedious that you never did it anyway.
No, don’t let me even begin with scanning. Oh wasted lifetime!
Well, I’m exaggerating a bit, but you get the picture. Sometimes I feel the itch for, say, an F100, or maybe even Mike’s Leica, but in reality I feel perfectly fine with digital.
Digital photography is at a point of maturity, where quality is no problem at all. Yes, I could buy a 22 or 24 megapixel camera to replace my D300, but my current file sizes are well big enough to satisfy all my printing or bookmaking needs, let alone displaying on the Internet. I could get a D700 and gain even more ISO headroom, but, hey, perfectly usable ISO 3200, yes even ISO 6400 in B&W, that’s enough as well. At times I lust for a new lens, some new software, whatever, but film? Nope.
Maybe it’s the urge to be different, maybe it’s the unprecedented availability of cheap high quality film cameras, maybe it’s the feeling that we are at the end of an era, I don’t know what currently drives so many people into film, but one thing is for sure: it’s not for me.
@Andreas: All valid reasons. People like different things and, for me, right now, I’m liking film. I like the whole process of it. It’s what I grew up on. I’ve nothing against digital at all, but neither do I have anything against film. I go both ways!
As a matter of fact, I shot a couple of rolls this weekend and need to develop some tonight. There’s a lot of fun anticipation in that effort.
Well, it may have sounded like that, but I really didn’t want to turn film down. It’s more that I don’t understand the current fashion, and a fashion it seems to me.
Paul, what exactly is it for you? What makes you like waiting for a film coming back from processing, or when you do it yourself, what makes you like working with chemicals? What is it, that makes you accept the inconvenience of having to scan images?
It’s not that I want to turn down, it’s that I want to understand
@Andreas: I’m not sure if what is happening is mere fashion. I would suppose that many of us who grew up shooting film, eventually switched to digital and fell in love with the whole instant gratification aspect of it. I, for sure, know that I did.
However, what happened to me was that I became a rapid-fire, less contemplative shooter. A collector of images if you will. While I was out shooting, chimping became quite a habit, as did returning home, instantly downloading, grabbing out a few pictures, then off to the next adventure. I lost appreciation for the contemplative part of it.
With film, I seem to slow down. Sure, I could do it with digital, but I just don’t. Also, I really love the whole anticipation aspect of it all. The 15 or so minutes that I spend processing the film and the eagerness that I have to see what comes out of the other side has no match in the digital realm. Further, each film has its own characteristics. Digital sensors seem to all look the same. Sterile/Perfect. I don’t know how else to put it.
It’s kind of like asking someone why they prefer to drive an old beat-up Chevy, or some classic car, when modern cars certainly have a lot more features and conveniences. It’s just a matter of preference and perhaps nostalgia. It’s just something that you’d have to experience to judge for yourself.
I don’t like to wait for processing, which is why I do them myself. Scanning is not such a big issue. Sure, it takes time, but what am I in a hurry to get to? Where do all of these time savings go? I enjoy the process. I’m not a big fan of the hustle and bustle of American life. Always in hurry to get to the next thing. This is my way of taking back a little piece of my life, I suppose.
Lastly, it has to do with where I am in my life. I am a lot more contemplative in my approach to things. I guess that it comes from reading all of those Tao and Zen books.
I see and I can understand the position. I guess that part is taken for me by Photoshop. You know, I am what Ted calls an “enhancement artist”, and I easily spend an hour with an image like today’s. That’s my “slowing down”. I must, because I couldn’t process as much as I can photograph.
Started with a Retina IIa and Kodachrome 25asa slide film (thanks Dad) somewhere in the early 60s. Now I’m feeling old.
Yeah I remember.
Boy, do I remember it well! At one time it was even available in the 126 cartridges for use in my first camera, a Kodak instamatic.
I have many hundreds of slides, which I recently viewed. I even paid to have a few of them scanned and the results were outstanding.
@Adam: Thanks for posting! I stopped by your web site and viewed some of your wonderful B&W images. Regarding Paul Simon vs. Bach: yeah! I guess that Paul Simon is a mere child!
I cut my “photo teeth” shooting K64. Although I liked the look, I eventually switched into Fujichrome 100 because (as other poster mentioned) the improvements to E-3 and declining number of labs that processed K64 and the increasing costs of film and development.
Glad to see you are enjoying a renaissance of film photography. To each his own. I agree with Andreas; it’s not for me anymore. Heck, I’m still trying to get all my old stuff scanned in!
Yeah, I recall these K64 film rolls…. I have probably a couple of thousand of slides back home, all re-framed into CS frames (were they called that?). I’m not sure I liked the tedious work these slides meant, but I only had myself to blame since I didn’t stick with the standard frame. When it comes to slides, I really think digital is superior in about every aspect (perhaps but resolution). Slideshows with a computer is soooo much simpler, and you don’t have to change focus after having looked at a slide for more than a few seconds (remember?).
@Ove: Yep. I remember having to refocus because the heat from the lamp caused the film to buckle.