Farewell my Kodachrome

For years I shot Kodachrome for my art-historical documentation (though I did my best to make the shots beautiful in themselves). The slower the better, too: 25 and 64, and that fine grain was so wonderful.

I gradually stopped traveling with all my photo gear, as I fell away from active pursuit of dissertation research, so by this summer's trip to Italy it had been over ten years since my Kodachrome days. Nonetheless, I decided to pack up all my old gear to see if I still had it in me, along with the last few rolls of long-refrigerated film.

I was holding my breath when I got back to see if anything would come out, but sure enough, it was as good as ever. One roll of 25 had had an expiration date of 1988!

There are only a handful of places worldwide still processing Kodachrome, but Kodak is still standing behind its product for the moment, at least to the degree that if you have a roll and send it out for processing through Kodak services (I used our local CVS), it will be correctly routed and returned. Cheaper than sending it directly to the lab to which Kodak now outsources the work, too.

Now I'm experimenting with Velvia 50 . . . .

Posted by David on August 25, 2005 8:39 AM