kodachrome

Kodak has announced the official end of Kodachrome. Once A&I stopped processing Kodachrome, it became difficult to get a hold of, and when I moved to Australia it was impossible. Kodak says “The majority of today's photographers have voiced their preference to capture images with newer technology — both film and digital.” I have to ask though, if it weren't essentially impossible to buy and process outside out the United States (and not easy to do there), might more people be using it? Even when I did have the option of shooting Kodachrome I usually shot Velvia.

It's unfortunate though, because Kodachrome is arguably the best archival format for colour photography. I have serious doubts about the longevity of DSLR raw formats^[1] and it's not hard to find conditions under which JPEG quality is consistently inferior to film^[2]. Most of my grandpa's slides are Kodachrome and they still look terrific.

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1. sure they work fine today, but will we be able to read them 50 years from now? 20 year old computer formats can be quite difficult to read today, but printing from black and white negs — a much older technology — is simple
2. who's to say even JPEG will be around in 50 years? I can remember when practically everything was in GIF format

winter

It's Winter, but some of us are still holding on.