By now I'm sure you've heard that Kodak has discontinued its support for Kodachrome color transparency film. If you can find any you won't be able to get it processed. Kodak was the only company that made the necessary chemicals and it has discontinued the chemicals as well. For you post-digital photographers out there this may be of no special consequence. For those of us who learned to shoot color with Kodachrome it's the passing of yet another era. I'm not going to cry about it. After all, what good would it do? I will, however, post a few photos in its honor. These all all straight scans with only minor sharpening, curve adjustments and color correction. I hope you enjoy them. Just bear in mind that however they look on your display is nothing compared to how they look on a lightbox or projected on a screen.
I shot this back in the 1970s, while I was still in college. It won first prize in the Los Angeles Times Magazine photo contest. At the time, that was exactly the sort of encouragement I needed.
In the same vein, here's a sign painter doing his thing.
And now for something completely different. Kodachrome colors don't have to be bright.
This is a straight-on shot of a thrift shop window. Sorry about the woman blocking the view of the mannequin with the nifty Kodak Brownie rollfilm camera.
Out with the old, in with the new. Happy New Year, my friends!
Happy New Year, Gordon!
Terrific shots.
Seems that no one I've read has noted the irony in all the Kodachrome shots posted on the web over the last week: That not a single one of them was a Kodachrome. They were all digital images!
So the technology that killed off Kodachrome is what we use to honor and memorialize it.
--Marc
Posted by: Marc Rochkind | January 01, 2011 at 06:13 PM
>>the technology that killed off Kodachrome is what we use to honor and memorialize it.<<
'Twas always thus. Even in its heyday, Kodachrome images had to be translated into print for most people to see them. Whenever you look at something other than the original transparency you're looking at a picture of a picture. Even so, Kodachrome had a certain "look" that's hard to duplicate with a digital camera (assuming you'd want to, of course).
Posted by: Gordon Lewis | January 01, 2011 at 07:56 PM
Even with some of the best 'translators' available, I was never able to get the same look for an image. I was gifted one last roll of Kodachrome by a friend and sent it off to Dwayne's just before the deadline. It'll be fun to take a look at those chromes for old times' sake.
Posted by: Chris Klug | January 04, 2011 at 10:28 PM
Gordon, thanks for these beautiful Kodachrome images of yours - a fitting tribute to the 75 years of Kodachrome, and, IMHO, the best tribute of all the ones I've seen around the web on this theme.
I agree with you - I shot Kodachrome in my younger days (although a lot more Ektachrome,) but I'm not gonna get broken up by time marching on. After all, we don't shoot many Daguerrotypes anymore, do we?
Ken Rockwell has an interesting take on Kodachrome: he feels that it was obsolete by the '90s with the introduction of Velvia. He also says that its main advantage is that over the decades printers (e.g., at National Geo) had learned to deal with Kodachrome and how to get more out of it than, say, Ektachrome, which was a much younger product.
I tend to agree with him, but I don't begrudge anyone who has a more emotional or practical attachment to this great old film.
Best regards,
SteveR
Posted by: Steve Rosenbach | January 06, 2011 at 11:28 PM