Kodachrome: R.I.P.?

News of the possible death of Kodachrome film has me feeling a bit nostalgic — and really old.

Kodachrome 25 was the film to use if you wanted sharpness, fine grain and brilliant color.  The film was slow in its ultimate form — in bright sun, and following the “rule of thumb” exposure guide, the shutter speed was 1/30th of a second at f/16.  It was expensive compared to color negative film.  The Pro version of Kodachrome had to be refrigerated to retain its freshness.  Yeah — you had a lot invested in the image — you had to work at it — blowing the shot cost you money.

Circa 1980:  Sitting in an undergrad camera class in the university I attended, I remember my photography teacher (the head cinematographer at the university’s motion picture film unit) making fun of of some early attempts at making 35mm still cameras auto-focus.  The early units were bulky and didn’t work very well.  They were slow, cumbersome and inaccurate — besides, we laughed, who would want or need auto-focus?  While we were yucking it up in camera class, the camera class teacher, Mr. Ramsey, suggested that what the camera companies really needed to do was come up with an “auto-composition” camera…

“Can you imagine?”, Mr. Ramsey said, “A camera that, if you don’t want someone or something where it is in the frame, just move it.  For example, if the Sun’s in the wrong place, just move it where it needs to be!  The camera and you just rearrange all of the elements of the image until perfect composition is achieved!”  We all laughed.  How ridiculous!  And…we all blindly got back to studying reciprocity failure, grain technology, push/pull processing, matte shots….

Uh-huh — Mr. Ramsey had just described what we now know as Photoshop.

At the time, almost 30 years ago, now, my fellow classmates and I had no idea that computers, software and CCD’s would ever invade, take-over and re-make our photographic world.  Sure, we used computers at the time — with a card reader.  We had a few IBM PC’s, but we used them as electronic file cabinets or, in the case of our multi-image productions (with over 30 individual slide projectors + motion picture projectors and effects) as very fast and accurate switching units.  Never would have imagined that the images themselves would be stored (eventually) in the PC itself.

In a realtively short time, digital’s takeover of analog photography has reached the highest levels.  Kodak, whose only worry used to be Fuji Film “dumping” inexpensive film onto the US market, now has to worry about its very survival as a company.  (And some of us who concentrated on the lab side of analog photography are doing the same — fighting to survive.)

There are probably more images captured now than ever before in history — and that’s a good thing for the art of photography…

…but I just don’t have much invested in the image, anymore — especially since I can “fix it later.”