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The End of an Era – 1935 to 2010 « Steve McCurry’s Blog.
I was listening to the BBC’s World Service this morning (my “wake up” radio station of choice – less agressive and slightly more humerous than Radio 4 at that time of the morning), only to hear that the last lab to process Kodachrome (Dwayne’s Photo, a family-run business in Parsons, Kansas) was stopping processing the film, after Kodak had stopped production of the chemicals required to process the film. The last roll had been given to Steve McCurry. Above is a link to McCurry’s site and, in particular, some of the images that he took with this film. The following image is taken from his post as an example of the images and quality taken. All copyright remains to him and is only here as an example:
Mccurry’s Image of The Afghan Girl was also taken on Kodachrome stock. He had a retrospective in Birmingham earlier in 2010.
Personally, I’ve never shot with Kodachrome. I have enjoyed taking photos on various film formats (including both Kodak and Ilford) and actually enjoyed some of the results. I briefly tried working in a dark room during a photography night-class at a local Adult-Ed college, but was unable to take it further as the course timings conflicted with work. I can see why people like using film, but can also see their frustration over the development time as compared to digital. The former can take days, if not weeks to see the results (with a high potential ditching-ratio, which makes it expensive) as compared to seconds, with the ability to delete-before-printing those images that dont work.
