As mentioned in comments to a post the other day, Kodachrome is coming to an end on Thursday. The New York Times has a nice article about it. Of course this isn’t the end for film, or even of slide film (there’s still Velvia and a few other options). Kodachrome was always an unusual and capital intensive process. I was struck by the following sentence from the article: “At the peak, there were about 25 labs worldwide that processed Kodachrome.” That’s a very very small number for the _peak_ . There are probably still many thousands of labs that will develop colour print (C41) film and probably dozens even in the UK that will handle the more common transparency process (E6). Still, RIP.
UPDATE! – “More from NYT”:http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/29/a-color-saturated-sun-sets-on-kodachrome/ , with pictures!
{ 28 comments }
John F. Opie 12.30.10 at 11:24 am
Great film, horrible process. Poisonous and requiring a mind-boggling number of chemical steps (well, 17), each with its own temperature and temperature ranges that meant serious industrial work.
For that reason alone, E6 was developed (no pun intended). E4, the predecessor, still used some rather nasty chemicals, E6 cleaned that up and made it vastly easier to flush chemicals out of the film base and prevent them from getting into the ecosystem. You could even process E6 at home (E4 chemicals were never sold in kit form for home processing, as they were too poisonous to be sold to the general public…Tertiary Butyl-Amine Borane (TBAB) for one, but also sodium thyocyanate (51% solution!) and potassium ferricyanide, both cyanide complexes).
You can find the actual K-14 process here:
http://www.kodak.com/global/plugins/acrobat/en/service/Zmanuals/z50_03.pdf
Fundamentally, technological advances and innovation, driven in no small part by ecological concerns (in the form of legislation requiring less poisonous stuff to be dumped into the environment), made Kodachrome increasingly pricey for marginal differences in final product, and indeed E6 process films have made remarkable strides in quality (and continue to do so). Kodachrome couldn’t be changed that much or the process made less ornery and polluting, and I for one say: well, we’ll miss you, but good riddance.
I shot my last roll of Kodachrome, ISO 200, in my trusty Pentax 67 on a vacation trip in 1994. Fuji Velvia was as good, significantly cheaper and vastly more forgiving. Never looked back.
PHB 12.30.10 at 12:53 pm
Fortunately it is possible to capture the same effect in Photoshop with appropriate filters:
http://homepage.mac.com/pbize1/Scripts/PSAK200.html
But more generally, Kodachrome is daylight balanced and then some. So the net effect is that photos tend to look like they are taken on a bright sunny day even when they were really taken in incandescent or fluorescent light.
Since most of us like sunny days, most people like the Kodachrome look, even though it is not an accurate rendition of the ‘true’ colour. This is precisely what the engineers intended when they designed the process.
One feature of Kodachrome that has not had so much play though is the effect that it had on the colours we see in real life.
Before the 1930s the dominant colour palette in fashion and interior decoration was muted earth tones, pastells and such. The colours that were reproduced in the fashion magazines of the time. The arrival of Kodachrome allowed wearing bright, saturated colours to become fashionable.
Straightwood 12.30.10 at 3:11 pm
Although Kodachrome was a fine film, it is not easy to digitize the transparencies. The multilayered structure of Kodachrome renders the dust removal processing of most slide scanners ineffective, and correcting the color shift of old Kodachrome slides is difficult. Fortunately, there are commercial slide scanning services that do the labor-intensive work of scanning Kodachromes (in India!).
Once scanned, the marvelous detail and color saturation of Kodachrome reveal how little progress has been made in photographic image quality over the last 50 years. Most of the technological gains in photography have been in the area of speed and convenience. A properly exposed Kodachrome II slide taken with a decent lens in the 1960s will hold its own against the output of the latest whiz-bang DSLR.
FuzzyFace 12.30.10 at 3:30 pm
Mama, they took my Kodachrome away…
Alan 12.30.10 at 3:49 pm
I last used Kodachrome five years ago, on a mid-summer tour of outback Australia. That meant every shot was taken on a bright sunny day. The Kodachrome slides still look great. Since then, I switched to DSLR but I have never had results better than good old-fashioned colour slides.
Matt McIrvin 12.30.10 at 4:59 pm
Well, that’s today’s earworm.
Daragh McDowell 12.30.10 at 5:21 pm
I’d have thought whether the number of labs was ‘big’ or ‘small’ depended on their individual capacity and how strictly Kodak comparmentalised the technical processes for development. Might this just be a case of the company choosing to run several massive processing facilities directly rather than letting independent firms set up their own labs?
Chris Bertram 12.30.10 at 5:32 pm
Daragh: 25 is a small number compared to the thousands labs who do other processes. AFAIK, independents (such as Dwayne’s) were Kodak-certified.
Daragh McDowell 12.30.10 at 5:42 pm
Chris – and I should have read Wikipedia before posting the question. Apparently the development process is highly complex and difficult to perform, hence the small number.
Chris Bertram 12.30.10 at 5:45 pm
Indeed, and that’s why we aren’t going to see a repeat of the Polaroid story, where a third-party stepped in to carry on the tradition.
PHB 12.30.10 at 6:10 pm
Straightwood @ 2
Thats strange really because 1960s lenses are nowhere near a match for the modern ones. Lens design did not really reach its stride until the mid 70s. The great ultra-teles only date from the mid 70s when Nikon introduced low dispersion glass. I have the f/2.8 wide primes that Nikon made in the mid 80s through to today and they are nowhere near the quality of my modern CAD designed zooms.
If you compare the modern series of primes they are vastly better than any that have gone before. The recent 85 f/1.4 AFS has better sagittal coma flare performance than the legendary Noctilux.
It really isn’t hard to see why modern lenses are better. Lens design has always been highly mathematical. Mapping the performance of a lens by hand using manual techniques would take a week per iteration. A computer can return the same result in seconds. The result being that the lens designer can optimize for more characteristics than before.
The idea that the film era was a golden age is as ridiculous as the notion that the 1960s were a golden age of surgery. Photography is a craft as well as an art.
Kodachrome is designed to show a false colour balance. Digital cameras are calibrated to show an accurate colour balance. If you want the Kodachrome look just set your colour balance to give the intended look.
In fact Nikon has a mode on their professional level cameras that appears to be pretty much a Kodachrome setting.
I do wonder about the nostalgia for Kodachrome though. In the days I shot film it was Velvia that was generally the film of choice. I have shot plenty of Kodachrome as well but Velvia was my preference.
Straightwood 12.30.10 at 7:27 pm
@11
Normal lens design hit diminishing returns in the middle of the last century. Better coatings and computer-aided design have made marginal improvements, with most benefits seen in extreme focal lengths and wide apertures. In an image quality competition, I will put up a 55mm f2.8 Micro Nikkor, circa 1979, against anything on a modern DSLR.
Metatone 12.30.10 at 11:38 pm
Put me down as someone who preferred the range of E6 films. Velvia and Astia offered more options and more range. Agree that Kodachrome set the aesthetic of a generation though.
Omega Centauri 12.31.10 at 12:18 am
During the decade I shot landscapes, Kodachrome was the prefered film by far. Not just for the clors, but the resolution, and the stability of the resultant slides (i.e. long term storage). Unfortunately by that time it was only available in 35mm format, you had to use inferior films for the larger formats. I remember the old timers telling me that you could shoot 8×10 Kodachromes.
The newer lenses would have to be much better. The resolution (absolute size) of a modern pixel is much smaller than a film grain, so these modern lenses probably are well beyond the state of the art during the 60’s and 70’s.
MarkUp 12.31.10 at 12:22 am
@11 “It really isn’t hard to see why modern lenses are better. Lens design has always been highly mathematical. […] A computer can return the same result in seconds. The result being that the lens designer can optimize for more characteristics than before.
Kodachrome is designed to show a false colour balance. Digital cameras are calibrated to show an accurate colour balance. ”
Exactly… but mathematics is as much art as it is science. Some of the best lenses made are likely older than most anyone posting here. All photographic rendering contains falsehoods, spatially, chromatically, temporally… while the modern electric film may be more “balanced” it still has bias, and those do vary by who’s encoding that higher accuracy and what intent is intended. Whether that produces a better result depends on who devises the test, and who takes it. It’s all an abridgment of reality; having more of the authors words does not necessarily make the longer shortened version a better read than the shorter.
PHB 12.31.10 at 12:44 am
Straightwood @ 12
Well given that the 55 Micro f/2.8 was regarded as the benchmark in its day and its diffraction limited from f/5.6 on, its a pretty hard lens to beat. But even so the modern 60mm version is even sharper and has better bokeh. And on a macro lens, 1:1 reproduction is really something most people would expect these days so the 1:2 of the ’79 lens means that its sub-par.
For macro work however I actually use an even older Nikon series E 50 f/1.8 on a bellows with a reversing ring. Macro is the one area where I prefer the older lenses because they have aperture rings. The series E was intended to be a budget model but turns out to be identical to the Nikkor branded. If you are going to use a lens way outside the design parameters, then the older lenses are better. Using that setup I can get 10:1 reproduction which is pretty mush at the limit.
But still, you have there one lens from 1979 that would meet modern standards, and a normal lens at that. That is hardly making your case for 60s lenses. If you leave out the 50mm and 135mm which were adequate, the rest were pretty awful. The Nikon zoom of that era was so bad that it blackened the reputation of all zooms. And the 300mm ghosted and flared like a cheap EBay special.
Chris Bertram 12.31.10 at 8:18 am
#16 –
But still, you have there one lens from 1979 that would meet modern standards, and a normal lens at that. That is hardly making your case for 60s lenses. If you leave out the 50mm and 135mm which were adequate, the rest were pretty awful.
I don’t have a techie view about lenses and their design. I do, however, have a Nikon 105mm f/2.5 AIS, produced during that era, and it produces nicer results for portraits than more modern lenses do. Pretty awful it isn’t.
Chris Bertram 12.31.10 at 8:22 am
Here’s a page for lens obsessives:
http://www.naturfotograf.com/lens_surv.html
PHB 12.31.10 at 1:07 pm
Chris @ 18+19
Have you tried the modern primes?
What I was objecting to was the assertion that lens design has regressed. It is very clear that the opposite is the case. Back in the 1960s maybe 1 ‘professional’ lens in 5 met modern performance standards. Today the modern zooms pretty much match the performance of the earlier primes and the fast Nikon primes have all been outstanding (some of the Canon primes – bletch) .
Sure people can argue over whether the design tradeoffs of the latest versions are better than their successors. But the idea that nothing has improved is nonsense.
Straightwood 12.31.10 at 6:27 pm
PHB@16
I agree that the 50mm Series E Nikon is a gem. Indeed, all of the old Nikon normal lenses are very good at moderate apertures – and so are the Zuiko, Takumar, and Rokkor “normal” lenses of that era. I will grant that lens sample variation was probably greater in the bad old days, but the best old film era lenses, coupled with a high-resolution film like Kodachrome 25, produced excellent results, comparable to high-end DSLR output at normal focal lengths. Of course, for zooms, high-speed lenses, and ultra-wide or telephoto lenses, modern computerized designs are clearly superior.
Don Cox 01.01.11 at 11:42 am
“Kodachrome is designed to show a false colour balance. Digital cameras are calibrated to show an accurate colour balance. ”
Kodachrome was designed to reproduce colors as accurately as possible. Naturally the results are not perfect, and there are differences between Kodachrome, Kodachrome II, Kodachrome 25, Kodachrome64, etc.
Some later Kodak films were specially tailored to give the results that surveys found customers preferred, and sold as film for photos of babies or whatever; but not Kodachrome.
The first Kodachrome had limited dynamic range, like early digital cameras. Correct exposure was difficult.
No system that uses a limited number of primary colors can be “accurate”. That applies to both film and digital, and especially to skin tones and reproductions of traditional paintings.
Tim Worstall 01.01.11 at 2:51 pm
“Thats strange really because 1960s lenses are nowhere near a match for the modern ones. Lens design did not really reach its stride until the mid 70s. The great ultra-teles only date from the mid 70s when Nikon introduced low dispersion glass.”
One of the big changes was moving from thorium doped glass to make lenses to lanthanum doped. The process started in the 30s but didn’t really hit its stride until that mid 70s when lanthanum oxide became cheap enough and in large enough volume to start making the lenses out of 25% lanthanum oxide 75% (and variations) the usual silica. That’s what actually gives us the low dispersion glass required.*
But then that’s a libertarian (ugh!) talking about weird metals again, isn’t it?
MarkUp 01.01.11 at 4:21 pm
Just add some laudanum to your glass and improved resolution will beset you like never before.
mw 01.02.11 at 1:38 pm
Although Kodachrome was a fine film, it is not easy to digitize the transparencies. The multilayered structure of Kodachrome renders the dust removal processing of most slide scanners ineffective, and correcting the color shift of old Kodachrome slides is difficult.
That’s 180 degrees from my experience. I can’t remember the last time I shot a roll of Kodachrome, but I recently scanned many boxes of slides dating from the mid 50’s that I found in my Dad’s garage. The Ektachrome and other types were barely salvageable — the colors had shifted severely. But the Kodachromes were gorgeous, appearing not to have aged at all. I really didn’t have to do any color restoration. (I can’t speak to automatic dust removal–I didn’t use a digital ICE scanner. But it wasn’t a big problem).
Alan 01.02.11 at 5:15 pm
I still work with film and prefer it to digital for a variety of reasons. To name a few, I like the magic of the darkroom and fiddling with the chemistry to produce the aesthetic qualities and tonal palette that I have grown up with and love. I know I could quite easily just use a DSLR and then tweak the images on Photoshop but where is the fun in that? Digital has taken all the magic out of photography and at the same time filled our world with a slurry of banal images. More does not mean better; look at the rubbish that they fill satellite TV with! However, rant aside, digital does offer obvious and real benefits; just at the minute it’s not for me.
Connected to the chemical/ digital debate though, what always truly amazes me is the amount of people who obviously spend their time ‘geeking’ up photography, talking about how they use this new lens and this camera and that. It’s a bit like being stuck with men who use their new cars as extensions of their manhood. Let me ask you this, do we spend half as much time wondering what brushes Picasso used or what chisels Henry Moore used? Or for that matter did they spend all their time telling us? No, we do not and, no, they did not. Granted we do know much about their methodologies but to focus on that is to miss the point of the work itself, which is to communicate a message of one nature or another. Or, to express this in other terms, to allow us to experience the work and take from it what we will; this being dependent on what previous experiences we bring with us to the work thus making each person’s own experiences and judgements different.
Photography is still a very young medium of artistic expression when considered against other art forms such as painting or sculpture and in many ways our responses to it are still relatively small. Many view photography in a way that art per se was viewed in the Renaissance period; as a reflection of life, true to that reality as possible. However, photography, just as with Renaissance art, does not truly reflect life and is full of little unintentional nuances and deliberate fallacies by the artist.
We are now blatantly aware that aesthetically perfect photographs are possible. We are great at making them and the digital revolution is even better at making sure we can see them. However, being aesthetically perfect does not necessarily mean it is a perfect piece of work. What does the piece communicate and does the aesthetic suit this?
Photography needs to go through something of its own Modernist revolution if it wants to develop further as an art. We should be asking firstly, ‘what do I want to say?’ and then setting about how to realise that as best as we can. In this sense aesthetics and concept will become equally as important. Each will stimulate the other to produce more vibrant and relevant work whilst, hopefully, encouraging new photographers to push their ideas of what constitutes photographic art further.
Therefore, I suggest, it’s not your tools that matter, its what you do with them. Think outside the box!
Baltimore Investment Management 01.03.11 at 4:34 am
Wouldn’t surprise me if we start seeing more and more “vintage” photography processes and materials fall by the wayside. Someone above mentioned that you can fairly nicely simulate the Kodachrome feel of an image. You can achieve almost any look with digital manipulation.
MarkUp 01.03.11 at 3:59 pm
I just retained a photographic process image advocate who suggest taking all my collection of silver prints and converting them in to 9/11 commemorative pop-up coins. Guess he did not like the subject matter.
BigHank53 01.03.11 at 4:23 pm
Kodachrome was a technological marvel…sixty years ago. We don’t use mercury diffusion pumps for evacuating vacuum tubes anymore, either, for the same reasons: supplanted by newer products, and also poisonous.
BIM: some older processes are in fact being used by even more people nowadays. Platinum and palladium printing are popular with large-format photographers, and have made quite a comeback since the web made it easy to widely disseminate info that used to be very, very hard to find. The same goes for gum arabic, bromoil, and salted albumen prints, all of which were invented before 1900 and laid nearly abandoned for most of the twentieth century due to the convenience of commercial silver nitrate products. The effects can certainly be created with Photoshop…but you can put together an entire darkroom for the price of that software.
Vintage lenses: a lot of the old lenses were crap. Some of them weren’t. Average quality has certainly gone up, but elderly standouts are still standouts. The Nikkor 50mm F/1.2 AIS is still in production after almost forty years: $550 for something that won’t even autofocus. Check out the price on a Kodak 250mm Wide Field Ektar…if you can find one.
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