Kodak retiring Kodachrome film

Source: Associated Press via Google

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) — Eastman Kodak Co. is retiring its most senior film, the iconic Kodachrome, because of declining demand in this digital age.

Kodachrome was introduced in 1935 and became the world's first commercially successful color film.

It had its heyday in the 1950s and '60s and Paul Simon immortalized it in song when he crooned "Mama don't take my Kodachrome away" in 1973.

But sales of the unique film are now just a fraction of 1 percent of Kodak's still-picture film sales, and only Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kan., still processes it.

Read more: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hNE3DMbUR1JFgMdyf_i5s4aDM9rQD98VMDJO0

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Many of my most prized photographs were taken with Kodachrome before I switched over to all digital photography. Kodachrome will be missed.

While I shot mostly in Ektachrome, the end of Kodachrome is a sure sign that film is going away fast. Too bad. I like analog photos.

looking at it through a slide viewer, projecting it on a wall, and even scanning it to get it into digital for further manipulation. I've shot plenty of Ektachrome as well, and like it because it scans better (at least using Digital ICE to reduce defects like dust and scratches).

I sold my Nikon film gear to finance my move to digital, and I truly think it's made me a better photographer, since I can experiment with instant feedback, rather than waiting to see what worked.

Did you stay with Nikon after you moved to digital?

I'm just about ready to buy an Olympus E-30 to add to my E-1.

I need to pickup a D300 for a backup body to my D3 though. :)

I was sorely tested to go Olympus a few times. :)

Every camera is a compromise, the early Oly E-system bodies had some serious compromises, but the lenses are absolutely gorgeous pieces of glass, and that's what drew me to Oly. The fact that I need only two lenses to go from 28-400mm (35mm equivalent field of view) was a big plus.

I used to shoot 6x6cm Ektachrome exclusively for magazine work, but then switched my field and no longer needed to illustrate my articles.

I also shot 8X10 Ektachrome with a view camera for backlit transparencies I sold at art fairs. They were simply spectacular, and I had a local custom lab that processed them fairly inexpensively.

No more. I just use my digital camera now, and don't do any professional work any longer. I sort of miss it, but only sort of.

Nor mama either.

He's going to lose his monopoly!

It is by far the most sensitive film around, with the ability to capture the smallest details that you won't find anywhere else, on any other film. I wonder if it will still be available for pros?

I've come to hate a lot of print film because it's mindless. If I'm going on a shoot, I should be using the film that the publications want, and it usually means slides.

I never shot any Kodachrome, but the people I know who did have pretty much all moved to Velvia, if they're still shooting film.

I've only used Velvia a bit, but that is what I heard.

Kodachrome slide film is wonderful, with warm colors. I've used it forever it seems.

There are at least three Velvias on the market--Velvia 50, Velvia 100 and Velvia 100F. Velvia 100 is REALLY saturated, like the original ISO 50 Velvia was. The new V50 and the V100F are not so bad.

Of course, that was black and white, but it is still sad to me to think of the decline of darkroom photography.

You know, someone who still prefers doing things the old-fashioned way and would be more than happy to keep making Kodachrome (or whatever it's renamed) for those who insist on using it.

There are less than a dozen companies in the whole world who are set up to make photo film, and they're all huge.

this is appalling! are the ONLY jobs we save in amerika going to be bankers and insurance folk? where is the humanity folks? oh, gohd...the humanity!!!


































do I need to post this :sarcasm:?

Now Dwayne can put in another pornowriter, or another machine that will make him money.

(Right now you're wondering what a pornowriter is. Well, I'll tell you. In the 1990s Gretag introduced the first all-digital minilab. It was small enough to fit in anyone's home, and it didn't cost very much either--somewhere around $20,000. I saw one at a trade show and the Gretag rep was showing it off to me, he was so proud. Wonderful machine. You can scan negs, scan slides, send it JPEGs, TIFFs, just any bitmap format you want and it's extensible. I told the guy that I thought it would be great if you were selling hardcore porn. He started looking over his shoulder to make sure his boss wasn't there before he told me he'd sold several of them to pornographers. Today all porn is digital, but then it wasn't.)

It should not be a big deal to make Kodachrome into a "boutique" item for specialists who still do film photography. The same thing goes for other beloved film stocks, including moving picture film stocks.

This is part of a technological art form, for which there is always likely to be a demand. I am surprised that there is no way to keep these things from disappearing.

--d!

fantastic but I had switched to Fuji Velvia a while back. It's also a very good slide film.

I liked it, but still kept going back to Kodachrome before abandoning film.

It was his Kodachrome shot of the Afghan girl that graced the 1985 cover of National Geographic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharbat_Gula

I described downthread what a bitch Kodachrome processing is. For many decades, Kodak was the only company who could process it--and sold the film with processing included in the price, which was one of its biggest attractions. The roll of film came with a mailer; you put the exposed roll in the envelope and got your slides back in a week or so.

Because National Geographic was the largest Kodachrome customer, Kodak installed a processing line on the premises of the National Geographic Society headquarters in Washington, DC, and had trained technicians in place to process all the film NGS used. IIRC after the consent decree which separated film from processing, National Geographic bought the machine from Kodak and continued to process their own film.

Oh yes: because of how Kodachrome was processed it was possible to color correct a roll of it, and they offered this service. There's a story about a Texas photographer who sent them a flower and said, "match this." No one's quite sure if they did, but they could have.

I'm going to run out and get some film. Be right back...

It's getting hard to get slides developed. It's down to just a few major places.

still in the boxes, from 1981-82...sad to say, our office threw it all out

Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, Oh yeah. I got a Nikon camera. I love to take a photograph. So mama don't take my Kodachrome away ..."

Kodachrome, by Paul Simon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hSXKjHDKkY

;)

If you've ever developed slides and made prints from them, then you know just how nasty and caustic those chemicals are. They simply don't compare to the chemicals even for color negatives in environmental hazards. Luckily, we have a better consciousness towards the environment and aren't just dumping those spent chemicals down the drain any longer.

Sure, digital has its problems, too, but since we do have a better idea of protecting the environment with regards to processing silicon chips, I will continue to take digital over film any day. I won't cry for the demise of film :)

This post is going to get somewhat technical. For that I apologize, but unfortunately it's got to be this way. I'm going to tell you how to develop film.

There are two basic kinds of films: those used to make negatives, and those used to make slides. (Some of you real old coots may remember the "Prints and slides from the same film!" ads in the back of the camera magazines. Those guys were selling motion picture film stock, and printing it on movie print film. This works, but it's not the magical process the ads made it out to be.) We can get back to the negative film later if you'd like, but right now since we're talking Kodachrome we'll talk about slide film.

When you take a picture with film, it changes the physical structure of the light-sensitive silver halides. A developing agent in the film developer causes any grains of halide that have been so affected to become metallic silver. At each place where this happens, a little cloud of oxidation comes forth. In a color film, there are chemicals called color couplers. When a color coupler and a little cloud of oxidation meet, dye forms.

We talked about film that makes negatives. Well, ALL film, including slide film, will produce negatives--the brightest spots in the scene become the darkest spots on the film. You make a slide by developing the film twice--first in a developer that won't make dyes, and then in one that will. Between the two developers, you soak the film in "reversal bath" to make the remaining halides developable.

At this point there are two ways you can possibly go. The first is the Ektachrome system. There is a layer in the film that's sensitive to red light, one sensitive to green and one to blue. Each layer carries color couplers with it. When you do your color development, all the colors are developed at one time. If you can figure out some way to keep your solution temperatures at 100.4 degrees, plus or minus half a degree, you can develop Ektachrome anywhere. You can develop it in your back yard, if you like. (War story time: There's a little film developing machine called a Jobo. When I was at Fort Hood, I had one of my own, and one of the other platoons in my battalion wanted one for their work. The colonel said he'd get them one if he could see one in action. I got recruited...and demonstrated the machine by developing two rolls of film on the colonel's desk. They got their machine that week.) All color slide films made today except for Kodachrome use this process.

Kodachrome doesn't have any color couplers in the film, and the process couldn't be any more different. After the first development, you reverse the red layer by exposing the film to red light. You then use a diffusion-controlled developer which develops only to a certain thickness in the emulsion. Next, you reverse the green layer with green light, and use another diffusion-controlled developer. And finally you reverse the blue layer in a chemical bath and develop it. All these developers contain the necessary color couplers. They're sold as dry chemicals, and you have to mix them very carefully then test them with control strips--short pieces of Kodachrome you run through your processor then measure with your spectrophotometer. If you want this process to be even remotely profitable--remember, not only do you need a set of very perishable chemicals but a machine that can't be used for anything else, and that's twice as big as any other machine you've got--you have to process a shitload of Kodachrome, which is hard to do when most of the guys who are still shooting chromes stopped using Kodachrome because Fuji Velvia--which runs in the same E-6 process as every other slide film on the market--kicked its ass in 1990. If you were a lab manager who ran a lot of chromes, would you want a Kodachrome processor, or two more E-6 processors so you could do push processing and pull processing on one of them?

The question I have isn't "why is Kodak discontinuing Kodachrome," it's "what took them so damn long?"

Incidentally, I have it on good authority Paul Simon switched to digital because he got tired of waiting for his Kodachrome to come back from Kansas.

It definitely addresses some of the lesser known bits of film developing.

Did one process hold up longer under average home conditions than the other? My grandfather shot exclusively Ektachrome with some Kodachrome mixed in. He shot gazillions of pictures in the 40's through the '70's, many 100s of them slides. At this point, some look very good, some pretty bad. There's no way of knowing if the kind of film is the difference and I am just curious. From what you are saying here, I'm thinking he used Ektachrome because he could process it himself, but I was too young ask him at the time. I remember he had SOMETHING against Kodachrome.

The first is the processing issue--it's got to be run at a lab with a Process K-14 machine, and almost no one has one. The labs that DID have one, didn't do short-notice processing. If there's an E-6 lab in the town you're shooting in, it only takes a couple of hours to process and mount a roll of film.

The OTHER problem is lightfastness. Kodachrome is famous for its dark stability--I've heard claims that Kodachrome's yellow dye is stable for 160 years or more, when the slides are stored in dark areas. (I've also heard the current Ektachrome process, if it's developed correctly, is very close to Kodachrome's stability.) The problem is, if you project these slides like you're supposed to, Kodachrome's light stability is about half of what Ektachrome's is.

Oh, and the shit scans blue. There's something weird about the way it's made, but every Kodachrome I ever scanned, I had to pull magenta and cyan out of.

Besides, Kodak discontinued the only interesting Kodachrome, Kodachrome 25, in 2002. Kodachrome 64 was good...but then again so were a lot of the E-6 films.

Kodachrome was developed during the same amazing era, before the second world war.

As science and technology progressed much easier, safer, and less polluting ways of accomplishing the same sorts of technological magic were found. It's surprising to me that kodachrome lasted as long as it did.

There are still a lot of people who use old cameras, even people who make their own cameras and tintypes pretty much from scratch, but complex plateau technologies like kodachrome are rarely resurrected once they are discontinued.

Digital photography has rekindled my interest in film. I've bought most of the cameras I once had as a kid, and the cameras I "almost" bought as a young man, and quite a few much older cameras from 1910-1940, all for next to nothing. It's great fun to take pictures with them, even if I have to rig them up to accept 120 film. And I'll be really sad if Fuji abandons peel apart instant film. Nothing says "camera nerd" like my Polaroid 180. But I'll never be like these guys who are trying to bring back the other polaroid films:

http://www.the-impossible-project.com

We gain technologies, but we also lose them. Bringing them back is never easy. The newest cable car in San Francisco cost $823,000 to build. One can't even guess what a giant steam locomotive of the 1930's might cost today, and pretty soon now the unwritten expertise required to make kodachrome will fade away.

The last steam locomotives built by the Lima Locomotive Works, which were delivered in the spring of 1949, were 2-8-4s for the Nickel Plate Road. They cost $250,000 each, give or take. I can get you the exact figure, but not at this moment.

China has built some steam locomotives recently for tourist lines in Iowa and Pennsylvania. I don't have the cost for those in front of me right now.

Getting back to Kodachrome: Kodachrome 25 became my exclusive film sometime around the late 1970s. I know I had made the switch completely by 1981, as that's all I took with me when I went on a backpacking trip through Europe. I bought it mail order from New York, with developing included. I dropped the film off on the way and had it sent back to the States.

People said Kodachrome was too slow for shooting trains, but they were wrong. You got more blur from not using a tripod and a cable release. Use them, and the pictures are beyond compare. Kodachrome 25 has been gone for ten years. Now Kodachrome 64 is going.

Thanks to the lister for the explanation of the developing procedure. Also, someone wanted to know how to tell Ektachrome and Kodachrome apart. Shouldn't the slide mounts be so labeled? Further, the back of Kodachrome slides have a rough appearance, sort of satiny. Ektachromes will be shiny on the back.

I was in tears when I heard the news. I will miss Kodachrome.

... but I didn't know about the Chinese built locomotives in Iowa and Pennsylvania. It makes me happy the art is being maintained somewhere.

Kodachrome and railroad photography do go together splendidly. I'll miss it too.

Hmmmm..... I wonder if there's a Chinese company that could make Kodachrome?

There might be a few oceangoing vessels or river boats powered by reciprocating steam, but they would be an exception. In 1981, I noticed, as I was leaving the boat, that the Köln-Düsseldorfer Line river boat I had been on was powered by reciprocating steam. I wish I had known that earlier, as I would have tried to make a visit to the engine room. Nukes and steam turbines are a different story, of course.

Chinese Steam Locomotives

Thanks for writing.

My mom was born in 1934. Her father was a semi-professional photographer from the 1930s until his death in the '80s.

That man shot a lot of Kodachrome as well as color negative films. I have most of his slides and negatives.

My father was born in '33, HIS father was never without a camera in his hand and the resultd are prodigious. This one of the reasons I continue to shoot film. My heirs will have to sort through many, many boxes of prints and slides taken by my grandfather, my father, and me. People who shoot digital....nothing. The heirs won't have the technology to look at it, and the few that are printed will have faded to white.

While he favored Ektachrome, he did quite a bit with Kodachrome as well and they've stood the test of time nicely.

When people ask me why I left Rochester 3.5 years ago to come to the armpit of the Universe - New Jersey. I can't even be sad - it is what is. Rochester is a dying town. Grew up in the 70's and 80's there and my parents still live there. Until about 10-12 years ago it was always, "Who do you know who works at Kodak, Xerox, Bausch and Lomb, Dollinger, etc. etc." Now it's - you KNOW someone that works THERE? :-(