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Kodachrome last remaining film roll developed in Kansas
The final roll of Kodachrome film, the widely-lauded high quality colour film, is to be developed in Kansas today.
Kodak announced it was discontinuing the iconic film in 2009, after competition from digital cameras caused a large sales decline.
Kodachrome is difficult to process, requiring expert handlers, and Dwayne's Photo in Kansas is the sole remaining developer.
The last film to be developed was shot by the owner, Dwayne Steinle.
Kodachrome film is renowned for its exceptional rendering of colour, vivid images and archival longevity. For many years, it was the preferred brand for print media.
Created in 1935, it was the first commercial film to successfully shoot in colour.
Kodachrome was also used for motion pictures.
Dwayne's Photo has been inundated with requests for developing, many from photographers who had been hoarding the coveted film for years.
One customer picked up 1,580 rolls of film used solely to shoot railroad engines. The nearly 50,000 slides cost $15,798 (£10,200) to develop.
BBC photo editor Phil Coomes has been documenting his own final days with Kodachrome, as well as collecting reader photographs on his BBC blog.
Afghan Girl
One of Kodachrome's most famous admirers is National Geographic's Steve McCurry, the photojournalist who captured the world's attention with a haunting 1984 cover photograph of Sharbat Gula, an Afghan refugee girl with stunning green eyes.
Ms Gula, whose identity remained unknown for many years, did not see the image until a documentary film crew located her in 2003.
Although Mr Steinle developed his own Kodachrome roll last, Kodak gave the final roll it produced to Mr McCurry.
With just 36 frames to use, he travelled to India to photograph a tribe on the verge of extinction.
Mr McCurry also shot images of New York, Kansas and actor Robert DeNiro in a journey filmed as a documentary by National Geographic.
He hand-delivered the last roll to Dwayne's Photo earlier this year.
"I wasn't going to take any chances," he told the New York Times.
The National Geographic film will likely air in spring 2011.
And so another old technology passes on to the pages of history.
Am I the only one who doesn't get the love affair with film? Why is this even a big deal, with somebody getting the last roll and making sure the pictures he took with it were important? There is a reason we use digital now, nobody wants to deal with actual film.
Am I the only one who doesn't get the love affair with film? Why is this even a big deal, with somebody getting the last roll and making sure the pictures he took with it were important? There is a reason we use digital now, nobody wants to deal with actual film.
Except that also even digital film is well, FILM.
Also if you think that by going digital, magnetic tape (film and audio) is going away anytime soon think again, especially for music since master copies are ALWAYS recording on reel-to-reel tape, and movies are shot on 16 or 35mm digital FILM...
None of that has anything to do with film for handheld still cameras, which is what this article is about.
Though more to the point, a good deal of audio and video production is now 100% digital, which is to say it never once involves a piece of actual film. With more movie theaters switching over to digital projectors, even the distribution of movies will eventually be rid of magnetic film. So I am not sure where you get the idea that movies and music still need to be put down on magnetic film, as that is clearly going to the wayside.
The Wiki page for digital cinema details how modern digital movies are recorded, edited, and subsequently released without ever being put on film.
It is not really any different than any other love affair, be it with vinyl, 69 Camero, 64 Vet . . . I for one was sorry to see KodaChrome go. Yeah, I have a high end digital camera, and it takes pictures that are OK, and they will last for as long as the media they are stored on, but shooting real film (particularity, Kodachrome) is sorely missed by me, and many others. To use real film takes a lot more talent than shooting digital, and frankly the quality is not the same, just like analog vs. digital audio. Time marches on, but my 1" tape deck, 35mm camera and a few other select items can not be replaced with equivalents today. Probably well less than 1% of people would ever notice (or care about) the difference between a high quality analog recording vs and MP3, or a Kodachrome image vs a digital image. The difference can be striking, but most people don't care enough to look (or hear) the differences.
@Jeebizz
Actually they do have all digital studios that record direct to hard drives and not to tape. They also have 100% digital processing for movies now as well. As I get older I guess it will matter less and less as my vision declines and my hearing fades. The richness of both analog recording and images are lost to the younger generations that have been brought up on slightly harsher and less flexible digital audio / images.
Just my two cents worth (while they still make pennies) ;^).
Am I the only one who doesn't get the love affair with film? (..) There is a reason we use digital now, nobody wants to deal with actual film.
Liking Ilford B/W myself I kind of can relate to this marking the end of an era but if you never used old school cameras, tried different films to get the atmosphere you want to convey and developed film yourself I guess it's easy to miss the whole point.
Oh no! That is really tragic news. Kodachrome was the most permanent form of analog storage -images would last for decades with little degradation.
Capturing an image digitally is definitely inferior to using film. Slide film has a resolution of over a trillion pixels to the inch! But what is really missing with digital capture are the subtleties of light manipulation using different films and developing processes.
I still use a 35mm film camera for my favorite work -even though digital media have many great advantages. I dread the day when real photographic *prints* are gone -leaving us with only digital prints.
I wonder -maybe Kodachrome is still being produced in Kodaks Latin-America factories??
Liking Ilford B/W myself I kind of can relate to this marking the end of an era but if you never used old school cameras, tried different films to get the atmosphere you want to convey and developed film yourself I guess it's easy to miss the whole point.
Without want to disagree with that in the slightest, for real highest quality stuff I always have, and presumably always will, prefer Kodak Technical Pan. That is one discontinuation that I will always regret and will also regret that I didn't buy a lifetime supply and fill my freezer. After all, who really needs food...
But you must admit that digital is convenient. It does make all the messing about, dunking things in noxious liquids seem a bit, well, unnecessary.
Well, I really do not know much about this film, it is more than twice my age. And I have not done much of photography with film cameras. I got my first camera just months ago at age 27. Its a digicam Nikon P100. But I wish I had been there while films were used for photography. Its so much skill work to do that. Digicams are bloody so convenient. And easy too.
I've just been shooting sulphur crested cockatoos 50' up gum trees lit by the sunset.
I would never know what I had on film - I *know* what I've got now. Digital is the way these days. Spend some money and get good kit is all I say.
It does is convenient but film cameras would have helped me hone my photography skills a lot better than these digi cams. These are so convenient that I can take as many clips as I want and delete if I feel I dont like some. And camera does that for me on click of buttons. But film cameras are so much so different. You dont know how good the click was until you get the film developed. And you understand the photography technically better with those cameras where most of the functions are manual.
Since digital is the way forward, I'd just like to find a digital camera that gives me the control like I used to have with a *manual* 35mm camera. Nearly all auto-focus lenses have manual control as an afterthought, so that the controls are sloppy, small and hard to use.
Since digital is the way forward, I'd just like to find a digital camera that gives me the control like I used to have with a *manual* 35mm camera. Nearly all auto-focus lenses have manual control as an afterthought, so that the controls are sloppy, small and hard to use.
My 8 MP Canon D-SLR has manual settings as well as interchangeable lenses. Also if you really know what you are doing, not only you can go purely manual but you can save your images as RAW form.
I wonder if digital cameras now however save images in lossless JPEG?
Also I wonder since you are in Germany, doesn't BASF still make camera films? I remember back in the days seeing tons of stuff from BASF, particularly audio and video tapes as well, and I know I have seen rolls of film from BASF.
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Goodbye Kodachrome
