goodbye Kodachrome

A clear sign that the digital age is firmly here is the closure of the last Kodachrome processing facility in Kansas. 

The New York Times reported that a railroad worker from Arkansas was among the last customers to get a roll of Kodachrome film processed at the last photo lab to do the work: Jim DeMike, 53, arrived at Dwayne’s Photo this week to pick up 1,580 rolls of film, all of railroad subjects. The processing order cost $15,798.  Now that is commitment! We hope there are plenty of good photos in that collection.

We're not sure if this means that those who still have unprocessed Kodachrome can get them done anywhere else, as it was a proprietry process.

Its demise is a little sad, as it was certainly a good camera film.  Photos taken on it survived the ravages of time much better than alternatives such as Agfa did.  Of course if the slides weren't stored properly, in dry cool dust free environments, then they still deteriorated.  When we did New Zealand 1950s Steam in Colour, most of slides for which were Kodachrome, the lab scanning the slides sent us samples with the question, "are you sure you want to go ahead with this?"   Well it was historically important, so we did. Covered with crud, cobwebs, purple areas, fading patches, it took two of us two full weeks with Photoshop to get the 400 scenes to an acceptable standard (of course a few grumpy gits, ignorant of the state of the originals, still criticised us, but they're part of life, unfortunately).