BurningSmell

Last click for Kodachrome

The king of colour and sharpness is dead. Bring on the Aperture plug-in.

I’m usually an “out with the old, in with the new” kind of person, but the news of Kodak’s discontinuation of Kodachrome slide film gave me a slight pang of advance nostalgia, even though I haven’t used film for at least 10 years and, as the Brewster technology museum shows, have been toying with digital cameras since 1994.

The departure of Kodachrome is another very significant spadeful on the coffin of film photography, coming only about a year after Polaroid laid its instant film to rest.

Kodak’s notice says:

Due to declining customer demand for KODACHROME, continued production of this film in no longer viable. Over the years people have moved from KODACHROME to other methods of capture, be it new films or digital. Simply put, not enough people are shooting KODACHROME for us to continue offering it.

I’ve fond memories of travelling the world with SLR cameras loaded with Kodachrome 64 and the slower, even higher-quality Kodachrome 25 (the latter was discontinued in 2002). The big attraction for me was that, simplistically put, the film could ’see in the dark’ — not in in the sense of shooting photos at night, but in terms of capturing detail in deep shadow, such as the grass in the shade of a tree on a bright day. Other films would tend to lose such details in a murky blackness. This was darned useful, I remember, on a trip to Iceland: although Iceland’s inhospitable interior has no grass and only about two trees, large tracts of that country’s interior are painted jet black with volcanic graffiti [photo: low | high], making for tough shooting conditions that Kodachrome seemed to cut through better than other films of the era.

Down in the Brewster basement sit dozens upon dozens of Kodak Carousel trays, each holding 80 Kodachrome slides. And right there you have the big bugbear with Kodachrome: as a slide film, there was no way of sharing photos with friends short of having them over for a photo-screening session in a dark room with projector. As everyone in the whole world knows, inviting friends to such screenings is a serious social faux pas: most people would rather have bamboo slivers hammered under their fingernails than sit through someone else’s slide show.

Most people would rather have bamboo slivers hammered under their fingernails than sit through someone else’s slide show.

So my Kodachrome photos tended to get siloed off, locked away and seldom seen (even by me) — a problem that will remain its legacy for quite a while, because it’s an infernally hard and slow process to get top-notch digital scans from slides generally and from Kodachrome in particular.

Which is why I can’t say I’m distraught over Kodachrome’s passing. It’s not untimely: it’s had a darned good run, 74 years at the top of its technology tree, and has captured some of the most stunning images in history. For all that, it shares the shortcomings — high cost, low convenience — of chemistry-based photography, and its days were numbered.

RIP.

Footnote: Kodachrome-related links.

• The authentic Kodachrome look.
• AlienSkin’s Exposure 2 plug-in and its Kodachrome 64 look.
• Kodak’s own eye-popping tribute to Kodachrome.