Last Roll of Kodachrome Processed

Wired's Gadget Lab picked up a wistful story from the Wichita (Kansas) Eagle on the processing of the last roll of Kodachrome film that Kodak produced. "Freelance photojournalist Steve McCurry, whose work has graced the pages of National Geographic, laid 36 slides representing the last frames of Kodachrome film on the light board sitting on a counter in Dwayne's Photo Service in Parsons [Kansas]. ... National Geographic has closely documented the journey of the final roll of Kodachrome manufactured, down to its being processed. Dwayne's is the only photo lab left in the world to handle Kodachrome processing..." If you have any rolls of Kodachrome sitting around not yet exposed, better get them to Dwayne's before December 10, 2010.

Comments

Figures

[eln]

36 slides

It figures he would make them into slides. Now all he needs to do is invite his extended family over to his house on false pretenses and subject them to an interminably long slide show. Brings back horrible, horrible memories.

Re:Figures

[Entropius]

What else are you going to make slide film into?

Re:Figures

[Anonymous Coward]

Confetti?

Re:Figures

[mcgrew]

I was going to make a similar commet to yours; they need to mod you up. The GP was doubly wrong; not only was Kodachrome slide film, but I've had many slides printed as prints; no slide show or projector needed. Of course, the slides look better projected, but you could still get prints.

*sigh* I'm getting old, I had to change the tense of all the verbs in this comment, as there is no more Kodachrome.

Re:Figures

[HockeyPuck]

In forty years, those slides will still be sitting in a box and will be viewable. However, it's not like you can put a DVD/CD in your attic and let it sit there, forgotten, for 40years.

At last thanksgiving, my great-uncle brought over a hundred or so slides taken in the 50s. It's quite something to see your grand parents in the prime of their lives and your parents as little kids.

For the rest of us, we just need to hope that flickr/picasa is around in 40 years and someone knows the username/passwords.

Re:Figures

[Anonymous Coward]

Top Ten uses for Slide Film:

1. Goat detection at night

2. Repairing broken transistors

3. Finding out where the moon is

4. Telepathic, brain-damaged, gay crabs

5. Pidgeon shit

6. Linux servers

7. Designing a robot

Re:Figures

[maxume]

Nah, people are getting a lot better at moving their "My Pictures" folder from computer to computer, and also at not only having 1 copy of it. Sometime 20 years from now, user workstations will probably even usually have fault-tolerant file systems running on storage hardware that provides much more fault tolerance than current drives (which actually don't do all that badly when you start thinking about how the storage works and the retail prices).

Re:Figures

[red_dragon]

I had to change the tense of all the verbs in this comment, as there is no more Kodachrome.

Last time I checked, Kodachrome film still exists, albeit all of it has already been developed. Just because it's been developed doesn't change the fact that it's still slide film.

Re:Figures

[Nadaka]

You think 36 slides is bad?

My father modified an old 8mm reel camera to take stills.

I have a reel of 12 thousand slides.

Re:Figures

[MightyYar]

Two things:

1. If you had 100 interesting family photos in digital form, sharing would be trivial and space requirements would be almost nil. It's likely that you would have already seen the photos and kept any that interested you - and the rest of your family would do the same. Basically, the pictures would never go "in the attic" because they are almost free to store on every hard drive you ever own, moving from PC to PC as you get new ones.
2. If your uncle had an attic fire, bye-bye pictures. And you know what? It wouldn't matter because you wouldn't even be aware that the pictures ever existed. Your Thanksgiving wouldn't have been as memorable, and that is all that would have been lost.

Re:Figures

[Serious Callers Only]

In forty years, those slides will still be sitting in a box and will be viewable. However, it's not like you can put a DVD/CD in your attic and let it sit there, forgotten, for 40years.

I'll bet you can put pictures on the internet though, and be sure that they will last a lot longer than 40 years, *if* someone in the world finds them valuable. I reckon stuff on the internet will last longer than slides or DVDs, but it is too early to test that conjecture. Perhaps if you lock them into some companies website, they might disappear without your consent, but that would be stupid, wouldn't it?

http://musiclub.web.cern.ch/MusiClub/bands/cernettes/firstband.html

Re:Figures

[Deadstick]

And with dead-tree books going away, he may not have anything to put under the front of the projector...

rj

Re:Figures

[commodore64_love]

Maybe you can upload your digital pics to Google Mail, and hope they'll still be there in 40 years (crosses fingers). Or copy them to a USB drive and hope that USB is still a usable connector in 2050 (unlikely) or doesn't catch on fire.

I've lost a lot of stuff over the years due to computer rot, but fortunately most of it still exists thanks to anal-retentive persons uploading the files to places like HVSC (C64 music) and AmigaArchive. Emulation is fantastic - keeps the old memories alive. Unfortunately that won't help me preserve those old digital photos that I've lost..... like my cross-country 2000 trip that disappeared when Geocities disappeared.

Re:Figures

[sleeping143]

1. Goat detection at night

Actually, a negative film's higher exposure latitude would make it a much better choice for this.

Re:Figures

[commodore64_love]

I have a gadget that you hold up to your eye, insert a slide, and view the picture. It's very handy.

Re:Figures

[hedwards]

That's what ZFS is for, with self healing and the scrubbing you know when things are going bad. You still need a back up, but you still have that possibilities whereas it's difficult to make proper backups of physical media.

Re:Figures

[Mantrid]

A viewmaster?

Re:Figures

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The kicker with analog storage, though, is that while a lot of it has good retention time without special storage(unless you get one of the chemically problematic ones, like early wood fiber papers, or certain types of movie film...); but getting great retention time can be quite tricky or even impossible, and getting perfect retention simply isn't happening.

Digital, on the other hand, tends to degrade good and fast if neglected(HDD probably won't spin up in 10 years, unless you are fairly lucky. CD/DVD blanks may well have re-blanked in similar time, Flash typically has a rated retention time of only about that long, archival tape should still be OK, but you probably didn't use that...); but it is relatively easy to achieve perfect retention for as long as you can attend to it. Just copy to new media, and store multiple copies.

Re:Figures

[iluvcapra]

What else are you going to make slide film into?

Super-8 mm film

It's called "slide film" because it's reversal stock: it develops as a positive that can go straight into a slide frame, without an intermediate negative. The film doesn't have any physical characteristics that make it appropriate ONLY for projection.

Re:Figures

[Hijacked Public]

If we are going to descend into the depths of pedantry together I'll have to point out that, no, it hasn't all already been developed.

I have some that used to belong to my uncle. The article is about the last roll manufactured. The summary even suggests that if anyone has any exposed Kodachome they need to have it to the only joint still developing it by 10 December.

Re:Figures

[Anonymous Coward]

No, a pair of fingers.

Re:Figures

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> sharing would be trivial and space requirements would be almost nil.

Plus, where the heck can you get slides of gay amputee midget Star Wars porn?

Re:Figures

[Anne_Nonymous]

Don't answer that!

Re:Figures

[gorzek]

With storage media as cheap as they are now, it should be cost effective for just about anyone to keep a few local copies, maybe an additional copy on a third-party service, and periodic backups onto flash drives or DVDs tossed into a safe deposit box. Naturally, how anal you are about your backups should correspond to the relative importance of the data. Your NWN2 saved games are going to be of substantially lower backup priority than your family photos and financial data.

Re:Figures

[Anonymous Coward]

i only have one finger you insensitive clod!

Re:Figures

[Grizzley9]

I think that is the point of online photo sharing sites like Flickr and Picasa. Why put them away in the attic, not to be seen, when you can put them online and view them all the time (or none) whenever you want to.

With tagging, gps, etc, our photos today have a much better chance at surviving than the older pics that seem to vanish after one or two generations because no one knows who they are or the context.

Besides, there are not many pics worth keeping past your generation anyway except as a way to identify you. No one will care about my recent vacation in 5 years except me, let alone 50. It has a great way of filtering itself.

Re:Figures

[DerekLyons]

In forty years, those slides will still be sitting in a box and will be viewable. However, it's not like you can put a DVD/CD in your attic and let it sit there, forgotten, for 40years.

You can't put slide film in an attic for forty years and expect it to be viewable either. You *may* get lucky, but odds are the heat will degrade the slides into uselessness.
 
Film *can* last a long time, but it isn't magic and poor storage can ruin it in an amazingly short time. That's why professionals use(d) multiple layers of dust free archival envelopes in temperature controlled storage.

Re:Figures

[imamac]

Just stack up a couple iPads.

Re:Figures

[Rolgar]

At least he had to go through the effort to put the film in the slides, and get the projector and screen out. Heck, after he went to the effort of inserting the slides into the holders, getting the screen and machine would have seemed like a piece of cake. And he was limited by the number of projector rings he could carry, slides he could afford, and the amount of time he was willing to take to put them together.

But now he can hook up a camera directly to a TV, and start a slide show at your house without you being able to lock the door when he heads out to the car to lug the projector and screen into your house. His limit, if he has 4 64GB SD cards in his pocket of his camera is about a million photos if he's scaled them to fit the screen size. Fortunately with the advent of the computer and internet, he can load them up, caption them to his heart's content, and you can not look if you aren't interested, or you can scan the thumbnails, and enlarge the 5 or 10 you think are interesting and not spend hours looking at hundreds of pictures you don't care for.

Re:Figures

[Anonymous Coward]

Big deal. I have a viewer I bought at a truck stop on Interstate 80 that already had a slide in it! Glued right in, permanent like. Boy oh boy, you should have seen it. It was of a woman, and she was so pretty. And busy too.

Re:Figures

[gstoddart]

*sigh* I'm getting old, I had to change the tense of all the verbs in this comment, as there is no more Kodachrome.

Mama don't take my Kodachrome
Mama don't take my Kodachrome away.

*sigh* At least I still have my Nikon camera. Though, sadly, my Nikon film camera is now a dinosaur.

"Mama don't take my DSLR away" doesn't have the same ring to it.

Re:Figures

[Will.Woodhull]

As cheap and large as external hard drives have gotten, they are now the most reasonable method for archival storage.

1. Use in pairs: mirror one to the other
2. Run disk checks at reasonable intervals
3. Replace the first (next) one that begins to fail and mirror from the other
4. Rinse, repeat.

CDs and DVDs still have a place as lowest cost method of wide bandwidth movement of data. But they no longer make sense as archival media.

Re:Figures

[gstoddart]

I'll bet you can put pictures on the internet though, and be sure that they will last a lot longer than 40 years, *if* someone in the world finds them valuable.

So, all pictures of boobies will last forever, and all other information will be lost to antiquity?

We are so doomed -- in 40 years nobody will know anything about now besides Brittney Spear's upskirt photos and myspace girls showing their boobs.

Re:Figures

[Albanach]

Nah, people are getting a lot better at moving their "My Pictures" folder from computer to computer, and also at not only having 1 copy of it.

You really think so? One of the most common requests I get from friends is to help because a computer/hard disk has died and it has all their photos from the past x years on it.

Usually they're told they need a specialist recovery service and are left weighing up whether those years of photos are worth $$$.

Re:Figures

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate to break it to you, but that isn't glue. Probably be a good idea to go wash your hands.

Re:Figures

[maxume]

How many of them do that again a couple of years later?

Re:Figures

[Freultwah]

Yeah, as it is almost infinitely better to watch somebody's ten times as long digital slideshow from a computer screen. You see, the problem with film was that people would think twice before taking the shot, there weren't many films packed in the bag etc. With digital, you can take as many pictures as you want! What's not to like? Anybody want to see 20 identical pictures of a hotel in Sarajevo? Sorry, the shots are pretty badly lit and out of focus, but still. I never delete anything.

Re:Figures

[tiptone]

Turn in your geek card on your way out the door.

Re:Figures

[Anonymous Coward]

http://musiclub.web.cern.ch/MusiClub/bands/cernettes/firstband.html.

I would collide those...

Re:Figures

[reub2000]

You can cut color reversal film into strips of 5 frames (or 2-3 frames for 120) and then scan it. Having the film mounted as slides means that part of it gets cropped.

Re:Figures

[Nadaka]

I was aiming for humor in truth, but I guess no one got it.

It was along the lines of:

if 36 slides of your parents vacation is bad, then imagine being forced to sit through 12 thousand slides instead.

Re:Figures

[couchslug]

If it's really valuable, kill some trees and PRINT it out.

Re:Figures

[nschubach]

It must have taken you forever to type that!

(sorry...)

Re:Figures

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense. Just stuff a few Kindles, Nooks, or iPads under there.

Re:Figures

[Rhodin]

Cross-processed negs, perhaps? But that's not up McCurry's alley and it's gotten a bit clichéd since the 90s when all sorts of ads use this technique.

Re:Figures

[0100010001010011]

20 years? I run ZFS now. Every photo I've ever taken is at least 4 places:
ZFS Raid 1. ZFS Raid 2 (With copies set to 2).
On my MacBook Pro. Sync'd to my online host.

Most photos are on facebook too.

However, if I died tomorrow... I guess I have 1 family member that may be able to recover them.

Re:Figures

[audunr]

Actually, exposed Kodachrome films can be processed into positive colour frames or negative black and white.

Re:Figures

[networkBoy]

To which I have to give a BOOO.
I still have a case of KR film in the freezer.
I suppose I could just shoot it for the hell of it, but that's an expensive waste of film.

Re:Figures

[Anonymous Coward]

You could always do that funny thing called printing them. Crazy I know.

Re:Figures

[TemporalBeing]

As a semi-amateur photographer, it is not quite that easy. I can easily go to an event and shoot up several gigabytes worth of photos. I use my SLR for all the important shots, and then my digital (with a Lumix lense) for a lot of the rest.

Yet all digital photos are not nearly as good as the ones from my SLR. Digital photography is just not there yet - and you loose so much.

Film has a lot of data recorded in it that can be very expansively blown up if desired; didn't matter if you used an SLR or a cheap throw-away camera. It still contains a lot of data; expensive SLRs just made taking good pictures that much easier if you knew how. (Easier as in getting everything setup right, focusing correctly, etc.)
Digital has a hard limit based on the hardware of the camera. Zoom too much and it'll pixellate on you. On top of that you have format loss if you use a lossy format to store the image in, further reducing what you might be able to get out of it.

Now, don't get me wrong - digital cameras are nice. They do take a lot of the work out of it for you. But you still can't get even a top-grade professional camera that matches Film at the DPI level. It's still a few years away.

Re:Figures

[Jazz-Masta]

Sometime 20 years from now, user workstations will probably even usually have fault-tolerant file systems running on storage hardware that provides much more fault tolerance than current drives (which actually don't do all that badly when you start thinking about how the storage works and the retail prices).

They said that 20 years ago about today. Failure is what pushes people to upgrade...if they made computers that didn't break or fail, what would happen to all the technicians? Same with cars that don't break. It's a question of cost, and they don't even do that now when RAID and backups are relatively cheap.

Re:Figures

[theshowmecanuck]

You can cross process it as well. If you shoot Ektachrome (E-6) type color positive film at double the rated ISO and process it in a C41 process (normally only used for negative film), you get what is called a cross processed negative. It gives exaggerated color effects and sometimes added grain. Examples of E-6 film are Kodak Ektachrome, Fujifilm Velvia, Fujichrome Sensia, etc.

Personally when I used to do this, I also often asked the lab to develop the film at half the rated ISO. But it is good to experiment to see what you like. And then it is important to do your own print making when using cross processed film since you can tune the color shifts using the color enlarger's filters. You need find a good commercial lab that caters to pro photographers for good results, rather than places that cater to amateur/happy snap film processing. I have to admit that when I did cross processed photography it was mostly as an experiment/learning experience. Normally I stuck with black and white. And I haven't really done a lot lately.

This won't work with Kodachrome since the dyes are in the chemicals and not on the film. Cross processing just wipes the image completely off of the Kodachrome film, leaving you with nothing.

You can also cross process from print film to color positive (C41 film processed as E-6), but because color negative film has an added orange mask (since the red and green layers of the film are somewhat sensitive to blue light too), you can get a blueish tinge on the finished cross processed slide. Additionally, there are also methods to partially bleach film while being process which is also considered a form of cross processing.

Although I am not certain of the chemistry involved, quite a few big budget Hollywood movies use/used cross processing to gain a surreal effect. Normal movie film stock is actually a 'negative' film which must be printed. Examples include "Three Kings" with George Clooney, Blackhawk Down, etc.

Re:Figures

[Opportunist]

Yeah, how did people survive that before the advent of mobile consoles?

Re:Figures

[Opportunist]

This is why I bought a 10,000 bucks server with RAID and backup system. It's STILL cheaper than trying to recover what's on it should the HD fry.

Re:Figures

[HockeyPuck]

I agree on the fire concept, an attic fire would have taken them out. However, how many family albums do you have that people have looked at in years or decades. Go ask your family and friends how often they look at their wedding photos?

I had pictures (scanned in .gifs) once on my Mac 512k (circa 1985) on floppies. The floppies are currently sitting in a filing cabinet. Do you think it will be any easier to copy these pictures off in 5, 10 or 15 years?

Forgotten digital data may be as good as gone, but forgotten photo albums can still be opened up and looked at.

Re:Figures

[MightyYar]

I can easily go to an event and shoot up several gigabytes worth of photos.

Agreed. You are not the same use case as the OP's uncle with a "hundred" photos found in the attic. I'd wager that those old photos were shot with a compact, perhaps even fixed-focus, camera... not the pro or semi-pro gear you are talking about.

Yet all digital photos are not nearly as good as the ones from my SLR.

Agreed - but for snapshots it is "good enough". The main thing lacking from digital photos IMHO is color depth - you have to chose the highlights or the shadows, where with film a properly exposed photo could get both.

didn't matter if you used an SLR or a cheap throw-away camera. It still contains a lot of data

I'm going to call shenanigans on you here :) A cheap film camera will probably not get exposure right, so you loose the improved dynamic range advantage. It will have a tiny lens, maybe even plastic and fixed-focus - so your enlargement will look uneven and fuzzy. True, a properly-exposed 35mm film from a decent SLR or nice compact will have more blowup potential than a digital camera of the same spec - but what's the use case here? How often do you blow up beyond 8x10, even given some cropping? I get plenty of resolution and sharpness from my S90 for 8x10 - all I'm missing is a bit of dynamic range, which isn't usually an issue in snapshots.

But you still can't get even a top-grade professional camera that matches Film at the DPI level.

While this is true, it's not an issue for most people who are not doing poster-sized enlargements. I'd argue the bigger advantage of film is in dynamic range.

Re:Figures

[wgoodman]

More expensive than having to throw it away since you can no longer process it?

Re:Figures

[MightyYar]

I had pictures (scanned in .gifs) once on my Mac 512k (circa 1985) on floppies.

Well, I would not have been making this argument in the late 80s! :)

I'm arguing that any decent digital picture is more likely to be shared than any decent analog picture. More copies = greater chance of survival. Sure, your stacks of ho-hum pictures stored on CD won't survive... but so what?

However, how many family albums do you have that people have looked at in years or decades.

I'm a bad data-point... I scanned in many of our old family albums, and my dad scanned in the Kodachrome slides. I have them stored on two mirrored hard drives, as well as Mozy AND Crashplan. I also put them on DVD as slideshows and distribute them to relatives as gifts.

Previous to this, the pictures were all in my Mom's hot closet, where all of the color photos were quickly fading, or in my Dad's damp shed, where even the Kodachrome was getting moldy. I contend that my memories are a lot safer now... though I grant you that if I were to die suddenly, it is unlikely that my wife would continue to be as rigorous as I am. But in that case, who cares what happens to the photos? I'm dead! :)

Re:Figures

[mcgrew]

If you don't shoot it and get it developed before December, it WILL be wasted.

Re:Figures

[maxume]

Sure, you can run a fault tolerant fs today, but it isn't a transparent feature of most operating systems.

I suppose time-machine is pretty transparent, and people get the idea there.

Re:Figures

[TemporalBeing]

I can easily go to an event and shoot up several gigabytes worth of photos.

Agreed. You are not the same use case as the OP's uncle with a "hundred" photos found in the attic. I'd wager that those old photos were shot with a compact, perhaps even fixed-focus, camera... not the pro or semi-pro gear you are talking about.

My family has also done the same - redoing hundreds of photos from slides in the attic. A few CDs for each individual that received them, or probably 1 DVD now. It is still quite a bit of work, diskspace, etc. And there is a lot more to it as well as you also have to through to:

• Make sure each photo scanned correctly
• Touch them up for aging on an individual basis - no, software cannot do this automatically as it's too specific to each photo.

So ultimately for each photo you push from film into the computer you don't end up with 1 copy at 6 MB. You end up with 4-5 copies at 6 MB, one of which is the final version. Now, multiply that by 100 photos - and you are now at 3600 MBs (1 photo, 6 copies, 6 MB each). Granted, you are only going to distribute 100 photos (600 MB); but if you really cared about the photos you'd be keeping the Work-in-progress as well in case you or someone else can do better in the future.

I'm going to call shenanigans on you here :) A cheap film camera will probably not get exposure right, so you loose the improved dynamic range advantage. It will have a tiny lens, maybe even plastic and fixed-focus - so your enlargement will look uneven and fuzzy. True, a properly-exposed 35mm film from a decent SLR or nice compact will have more blowup potential than a digital camera of the same spec - but what's the use case here? How often do you blow up beyond 8x10, even given some cropping? I get plenty of resolution and sharpness from my S90 for 8x10 - all I'm missing is a bit of dynamic range, which isn't usually an issue in snapshots.

I'll give you the low end; and true - not many people do. But at the same time you never know until after the fact.

For instance, one of my cousins took a photo of my grandfather windsurfing with a relatively cheap camera (e.g. not an SLR). They later had it enlarged to a 3'x4' wall photo. If it had been today, the digital camera would not have produced anywhere near as good an photo. Even a DSLR wouldn't have done as good.

So while it might not be often, when it is - it can be important, significant, and well after the fact - so you can't go and just take the picture again with a better camera or film.

Now add the long after-the-fact discoveries made from film photos where they enlarged the photos to find things. Digital loses that; and they've especially had issue as many people will just delete the photos instantaneously if they didn't like it, thereby loosing a lot of information - e.g. police investigations getting photos from people standing by after a crime, people that didn't necessarily knew a crime had happened.

But you still can't get even a top-grade professional camera that matches Film at the DPI level.

While this is true, it's not an issue for most people who are not doing poster-sized enlargements. I'd argue the bigger advantage of film is in dynamic range.

And yet there are a lot of Wedding photographers that use only DSLRs, that must then blow up for photos much larger than 8"x10". Yeah, they're "professional" all right.

Re:Figures

[networkBoy]

I've jettisoned CD and DVD archiving for space concerns.
HDDs are vastly more dense storage.
I still can't keep them all on all the time and maintain a full off-site backup, but for the important stuff, I do. The rest is stored in a chest of drawers in bin boxes.

Re:Figures

[MightyYar]

Now, multiply that by 100 photos - and you are now at 3600 MBs

10 years ago, I'd have agreed that this was a big number. Now, however, this is approaching 0.2% of a hard drive. A single DVD will store this, as will a $20 thumb drive. I have 8GB of storage on my cell phone :) Free online backup services give you 2TB - more than enough to store very high-quality versions of 100+ photos. Notice that you raised the bar here... the analog slides did not necessarily have any intermediate steps stored away.

If it had been today, the digital camera would not have produced anywhere near as good an photo.

Why do you say that? A 10 megapixel photo could do a 3'x4' print suitable for most purposes. With 10 megapixels you are at least in the realm of 35mm film - half at worst. A good pocket cam with real optics and a decent sensor (I'll plug my S90 again) will handle grandpa windsurfing just fine - it's even bright sunlight so you don't suffer from digital's annoying noise, and unless you are worried about capturing the detail in grandpa's teeth or the clouds, the limited dynamic range shouldn't be a problem.

A digital $35 Vivitar from Walgreens will give you horrendous pictures... but then so did the fixed-lens $35 film cameras of 20 years ago.

Besides, for every lost digital photo and every great picture of grandpa windsurfing, there is a story about the only surviving print getting stuck to the picture frame such that it tears when you try to remove it. Or a print lost in a flooded basement or fire. Or even just fade over the years.

and they've especially had issue as many people will just delete the photos instantaneously if they didn't like it, thereby loosing a lot of information

Has this happened recently? I can see 10 years ago when the cameras only stored like 14 pictures on the cheap 32MB card that came with them, but now you can go months before filling your card. I can't believe that people are still immediately deleting photos. :)

And yet there are a lot of Wedding photographers that use only DSLRs

Yeah, that's pretty weak. We picked a pair of photographers who shot with two cameras - a medium format and a DSLR. In most cases, the pictures were about the same - but we picked a lot of the medium format pics due to the ability to see the detail in my wife's dress. No question that medium format is superior to digital :)

Re:Figures

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Or, with the relatively low cost of CnC time these days, and the wide availability of barcodes with impressive robustness against partial defacement/destruction, just combine the old and the new: Encode your data in 2D barcode form, with a chosen level of redundancy, and have it machined into some suitably durable material...

Re:Figures

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought my dad one of the last Nikon high end film/negative scanners along with a 50 slide auto changer.

Slides that have sat in boxes since the 60s and earlier have been scanned into digital media, and shared among the family. As nice as the slides are, they lack the convenience of 'here is 9 gb of screen sized pictures".

I don't mind the investment in scanners and hard drive space, but most of my relatives just want to put old pictures of themselves as kids on their computer screen.

Course most of them wonder how dad's able to print and frame large sized pictures that look nice. They don't quite understand how poor a camera their cell phones have for printable pictures!

Re:Figures

[Anonymous Coward]

will still be sitting in a box and will be viewable.

Having lived with boxes of slides... I'll take my chances with digital for practical reasons. YES, the slides last extremely well, but having the long-term storage is the kicker. I even converted to Bell & Howell cubes from Kodak carousels to greatly reduce the volume required, and of course it's still nothing like the insignificant size required by digital. Then add the trivial ability to do bit by bit duplication, compared to the prohibitively expensive, volume-multiplying, and quality-reducing process of duplicating slides.

And I still get giggly when I notice how many images fit on a single memory card. Man, serious photography used to cost real money at only 36 shots per roll. There's no mystery why Nikon et al used to call their products "film burners" that made money for Kodak.

Kodachrome /was/ amazing, but so were stone tablets. Digital is one of the few "flying cars" that got delivered to my generation -- those who can, remember forty years back and imagine telling that kid that he'll have cameras that will shoot virtually unlimited images for virtually nothing, with almost no storage size. I really don't miss Kodachrome at all.

Re:Figures

[SETIGuy]

Forgotten digital data may be as good as gone, but forgotten photo albums can still be opened up and looked at.

If you haven't looked at them recently, you may be surprised to find how much the pictures in your photo albums have faded. If you want a good scan you may have to risk damaging the photo. To get decent reproduction of a significant photo I often need to spend 15 minutes post scan adjusting color and contrast and removing artifacts. For professional quality work, I need more time. Especially for Kodachrome slides. After a scan they tend to look like Ektachrome and need a saturation boost.

I've learned over the years that portable media should never be used for permanent storage. It's just not reliable enough. Use fixed disks for backup and a backup of the backup. When your archive is getting full, double its size. Never delete anything because you're sure you have a backup. I currently have 2TB in backup and another 2TB as a backup of the backup. At some point I'll buy four 2TB drives, copy everything over to them and stash the old backup copy somewhere safe. I've been doing that since large drives were 100MB. Those drives are probably still readable, but since everything on them is on the current archive, I don't need to find out. Expensive? Maybe, but not as expensive as it used to be. Better than loosing stuff.

Re:Figures

[networkBoy]

yes.
Because if the pictures are crap what was the point of paying to develop it?

Re:Figures

[Anonymous Coward]

Medium format vs DSLR isn't a single variable test. The main reason medium format film is so much better than a DSLR is because no remotely consumer-oriented digital camera has a sensor larger than a 35mm frame, and most are smaller than even that.

If you were comparing photos from the same camera with a medium format film back and a medium format digital back, if the digital photos were processed competently I very much doubt you'd notice a difference.

Don't get me wrong, film is great, and medium format film is even more great! But digital is, quantitatively speaking, not far behind at all, except in price. The digital back would probably cost something like $10,000. Whereas a roll of 120 Velvia probably costs something like $5 in America. You bastards have it so good.

Re:Figures

[falconwolf]

*sigh* I'm getting old, I had to change the tense of all the verbs in this comment, as there is no more Kodachrome.

I was concerned when I saw TFA title myself. I thought I might have Kodachrome film too but the one roll of Kodak slide film I have left is Elite Chrome, now called Ektachrome.

Fslcon

Re:Figures

[falconwolf]

If you don't shoot it and get it developed before December, it WILL be wasted.

No, not necessarily. GP may have a darkroom or could have the film developed using an alternative process.

Falcon

Re:Figures

[eugene ts wong]

That's exactly right. It's a sunk cost. You've paid for the film, whether you used it or not. Of course, you could sell it, but that's off-topic.

Many people have difficulty evaluating just how much something is worth, because of sunk costs.

Re:Figures

[siriuskase]

I'd contact that guy in Kansas. He might be shutting down the business, but I doubt he's going to bust up his equipment. So, he might be able to deal with you and your film after the deadline, assuming you don't dribble it out for too long.

Re:Figures

[petermgreen]

According to his website he isn't shutting down the buisness just stopping developing kodachrome.

http://www.kansas.com/2010/07/14/1403115/last-kodachrome-roll-processed.html

Kodachrome — The End of an Era

Kodachrome Film Status: The last day of processing for all types of Kodachrome film will be December 30th, 2010. The last day Kodak will accept prepaid Kodachrome film in Europe is November 30th, 2010. Film that is not in our lab by noon on December 30th will not be processed.

Dwayne’s Photo IS NOT CLOSING! We will continue to process other types of film and provide all our other normal services in 2011. Only Kodachrome film processing is being discontinued.

I'd guess that even with them being the only kodachrome processor left in the world they realise that with the film discontinued there just won't be enough buisness left to justify keeping the line (kodachrome is quite a complex process afaict).

Re:Figures

[falconwolf]

And with dead-tree books going away, he may not have anything to put under the front of the projector...

Yea, right. PCs were supposed to be the end of paper in the office back in the 1980s. But the paperless office hasn't arrived yet. If anything more paper is being used today. It's cheap, easy, and fast to print out documents today.

Falcon

Re:Figures

[Waccoon]

Basically, the pictures would never go "in the attic"...

In the real world, no. The overwhelming majority of people do not make backups, burn to CD, or systematically sort their files. That's the reason why a lot of people have dusty boxes of loose photos in the attic, rather than proper photo albums.

It's their own fault for not putting more effort into preserving their history and memories, but for the average person, digital will never be as permanent as something you can hold in your hand, no matter how many fancy interfaces or newfangled portable storage devices are created. Chances are, the relatives are not going to be any more diligent, either.

Re:Figures

[Anonymous Coward]

Not for Kodachrome, it is a 17 step process, quite fussy about the condition of the chemicals.

Re:Figures

[Chris Mattern]

Last time I checked, Kodachrome film still exists, albeit all of it has already been developed.

I severely doubt that. I doubt that even all of it has been exposed. Just because the last roll made has been developed doesn't mean that there aren't earlier rolls still unused.

Re:Figures

[toddestan]

If you don't care about the colors, there are several ways to get a B&W image out of Kodachrome film.

Re:Figures

[slick7]

Many people have difficulty evaluating just how much something is worth, because of sunk costs.

Many people have difficulty evaluating just how much something is worth, until it's gone.
Digital media can be manipulated, film leaves a frozen moment in time. Case in point, BP and their continuing distortion of the truth about the Gulf spill. These criminals are doing everything possible to make themselves look like innocent victims. Good luck with that.

Re:Figures

[sznupi]

Vast majority of "paper" works surviving to this day does so in fact thanks to retention.

Re:Figures

[TemporalBeing]

Why do you say that? A 10 megapixel photo could do a 3'x4' print suitable for most purposes. With 10 megapixels you are at least in the realm of 35mm film - half at worst.

You do realize that 35mm film at a DPI level is about equivalent to somewhere at or above 24-36 megapixels, not 10. They are just starting to produce 24 megapixel gear, and not even for the professional community - the extreme highend. So may be in another couple years, they'll get 24-36 at the consumer end.

Re:Figures

[MightyYar]

You do realize that 35mm film at a DPI level is about equivalent to somewhere at or above 24-36 megapixels, not 10

Well, it's a very hard comparison to make... especially since it's a moving target and there are many grades of film. The estimates I've seen go with 10-20+.

But my point is that the higher megapixels number is mostly useless. Few people run into a resolution issue. The camera I bought most recently only has a 10 megapixel sensor, but this lets it take in a lot more light and so I'm glad that Canon "regressed". I'm fairly confident that I won't be making any wall-sized prints, so hauling around a real SLR seems kind of overkill. That, and most wall-sized prints are viewed from a distance so a bit of graininess won't be noticed by anyone except me :)

Re:Figures

[gravis777]

In forty years, those slides will still be sitting in a box and will be viewable. However, it's not like you can put a DVD/CD in your attic and let it sit there, forgotten, for 40years.

I'm sorry, but this just seems to me to be the old analogue versus digital flame all over again. The problem with this argument is that you are assuming that all storage conditions are failsafe.

I live in an area with high humidity. Most of my prints I have felt over the years have been stored with great care. I am finding humidity has crept into many of my prints and pictures are sticking together. Luckily for these, I still have negatives.

Digital pictures that I took ten years ago still look like they did the day I shot them. I have archived to DVDs and storage media, as well as having them present online. While writable discs do deteriorate, I reburn every few years.

A worse case scenario happened to my aunt. Her daughter passed away a little over two years ago. Afterwards, she went through pictures, and when she went to store them, they were at the top of the box, along with the negatives, because they were the last ones they looked at. It turns out that the storage facility she used had a leak. While they paid her for damages, most of the pictures are waterdamaged now. the prints and the negatives. I have taken great time trying to scan these and photoshop where I can, with some of the results coming out very well, but many are beyond recovering, especially as many pictures were taken in the late 80s and early 90s, where girls wore colored print blouses and such.

The worst thing about these prints is most people did nto even know they existed. Now that they are scanned and restored, they are on facebook and Walmart and Walgreens, multiple people have been able to get prints and store them to their computer, and so forth. Multiple people can now enjoy these photos, and if something happens to mine, I know there are backups out there now.

Many photos taken before, oh, around 1985, tend to have really bad color fade - especially prints made at KMart. Most can be restored to a point, but most, the color is so far faded, you just can't do anything with.

Still labs around for color (and even real b/w)

[carlhaagen]

As a photographer I process all B/W film myself (t-max/tri-x etc. - the few times I shoot with real film, that is), but there are still professional labs around my corner of the world for developing all negative and positive color ("slide") film, and I'm guessing there will be for a little while to come, but chemicals and paper is getting harder to come by, though.

Re:Still labs around for color (and even real b/w)

[Anonymous Coward]

There are endless labs that still do film processing, but not Kodachrome, which has very specific and difficult development requirements. "As a photographer" you really should know this already, so I'm guessing you meant "as someone who owns a camera".

Re:Still labs around for color (and even real b/w)

[CohibaVancouver]

I'm guessing there will be for a little while to come

E-6 "Ektachrome" processing? Sure. K-14 "Kodachrome" processing? Very unlikely.

Re:Still labs around for color (and even real b/w)

[aliquis]

Does anyone happen to have a Kodak Kodachrome color profile for Vuescan for the Canon Canoscan 4400F?

Some settings for Lightroom which process the colors to something more natural when scanned with that scanner would do to.

Bought the scanner to scan all my dads slides from when we where kids or before that. But the colors turn out very weird. Weird gamma and very purple images I think.

Is this due to exposure when the picture was taken? Does all slides look like this? Is it because of aging? Does the scanner/software just assume the wrong WB/color balance of the film?

Was a stupid idea to buy it in the first place because it took bloody ages and results are poor, so I haven't scanned anything. Should had let some company do it instead because they most likely have way better hardware and knowledge.

Also I think someone said that it was better to scan at a lower resolution for some reason, is that so? Or should I scan at the highest and then scale the images? Don't really remember what the suggestions was. I guess I should run multiple passes? How many? 2 is enough? Would you rather scan in lower resolution and more passes or higher resolution and scale the image to get more of an "average" of pixels that way?

What would you consider the best methods in general?

I know there exist a slide holder for DSLR-camers. I probably should get a D90-replacement once available and such a piece instead. Put in slide, let the sun light it and take a photo of it. Done in an instant, raw and most likely better default WB-settings. I haven't understood how much the lights properties affect that solution but I guess the automatic WB may render that less of a problem.

May even have higher resolution, sure the scanner is 4800x9600 dpi or something such (claimed atleast ..), but for a small slide that don't mean that many pixels (or well, at that resolution quite a bit anyway ..)

Are scanner pixels RGB-pixels or are they single color pixels and then interpolated just as digital camera sensors (in most cases) are?

Does the scanner have higher quality pixels than a DSLR? (doubt that ..)

6+ minutes or so / slide for scanning vs a fraction of a second for DSLR photo of the slide makes a difference ...

I don't know how many slides there is but maybe 1500 or so.

Re:Still labs around for color (and even real b/w)

[aliquis]

What's the difference?

Ektachrome is newer/better?

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1730072&cid=33004206

I know I saw calibration slides/targets for Ektachrome but not for Kodachrome.

Re:Still labs around for color (and even real b/w)

[iluvcapra]

Kodachrome looks different. Not better or worse. The selection of one over another is aesthetic, like oil (Ekta) versus watercolor (Koda).

Re:Still labs around for color (and even real b/w)

[Mashiki]

Well processing b/w film on your own is easy compared to even colour. Even if you can't buy the chemicals directly from a company to do it, you can make them yourselves by buying the base. The paper is the hard part. And if you don't have a slide enlarger you can make on of those too. People seem to like colour pictures a lot, personally I've always found that b/w pictures done properly will win every time.

The only thing that I like about digital photography is that you have the picture instantly. With say doing your own b/w pictures, there's something special about seeing it develop in your own lab and getting the balances right.

Re:Still labs around for color (and even real b/w)

[CohibaVancouver]

What's the difference?

The "general consensus" among photographers was that Kodachrome displayed better colours than Ektachrome and Ektachrome's stepbrothers (Fujichrome etc.). However, today the difference is probably negligible and/or subjective (especially as Kodachrome is now gone) but the opinion lingers, in the same way people will always think French wine is better than California wine.

My dad has 50-year-old-slides shot on Kodachrome (that were stored in a cool, dark basement) that still look like brand new. It's primarily due to the design of the film and the way the colour is placed onto the film.

Ektachrome is a "subtractive" process where all the colors needed are built into the film. During processing, the "unneeded" colors are removed by the developer and the bleaches.

Kodachrome was a "dye additive" process whereby whatever colours you photographed in your subject matter were *applied* during processing. The film basically "grabbed" the colors it needed during processing. This meant there was virtually no grain in the resultant images. ('Tecnicolor' movie film was also "dye additive" and this helps explain why a 35mm movie frame could be projected to enourmous sizes.)

The dyes were also very stable and don't fade with time.

Re:Still labs around for color (and even real b/w)

[treeves]

Your last sentence - that's a key difference. The archival quality of Kodachrome. I've got a bunch of E-6 slides somewhere in my garage that I processed myself back in the 80's. I should pull 'em out and look at them one of these days. I bet they don't look as good as Kodachrome would.

Re:Still labs around for color (and even real b/w)

[carlhaagen]

Yes the exactly what I meant when I started off with mentioning that I develop my own film - someone who just bought a camera once and got no real experience. Actually, no, that wasn't what I meant at all, you second-guessing cabbage head. I really did mean "as a photographer", as one who does it for a living and as a personal interest since many years back. I know very well of the K14/M process and its earlier methods; in fact, in the 80s I worked as a copyist at a processing lab, and so, I have actual hands-on with manual developing (not all labs had automated baths back then) of probably every positive and slide film you can think of.

Re:Still labs around for color (and even real b/w)

[carlhaagen]

The general concensus was/is actually the color tone of Kodachrome versus Ektachrome versus Fujichrome etc., and their specific abilities in saturating their specific set of colors at specific temperatures. The simple guideline was always "Fujichrome for colder colors, Kodachrome for warmer colors" - these two films' color coding on the packaging was the classic guide for inexperienced photographers.

Re:Still labs around for color (and even real b/w)

[networkBoy]

I'll bet you $1K (1000 or 1024, your choice) that those E-6 slides have already started turning magenta.

Re:Still labs around for color (and even real b/w)

[networkBoy]

I use a coolscan V-ED so no help on the scanner, sorry.
If the images are purple (are you sure it's purple and not magenta?) but the slide looks fine to your eye then yes, you need to calibrate your scanner.
If the slides also have that color hue, then they are not K14, they are E4 or E6 and you will need to correct the images themselves.

The way I would do this is to use a batch process that is "good enough" for the average slide (Imagemagick and perl come to mind) find a set of corrections and if you really want to put in some smarts...

As to scanning, I batch scan everything at a nominal resolution of about 1200dpi and then preview all the images briefly. The ones I want to keep at a higher quality get re-scanned at 4800dpi.

The whole lot gets run through the filter for white balance if they were E4 or E6 slides.

Re:Still labs around for color (and even real b/w)

[SETIGuy]

The "general consensus" among photographers was that Kodachrome displayed better colours than Ektachrome and Ektachrome's stepbrothers (Fujichrome etc.).

It's not necessarily that the colors were "better" its more that saturation was higher is Kodachrome slides resulting in more vivid colors (especially reds, IMHO). I have no doubt that Ektachrome was more accurate in its color portrayal (although I thought its greens were too muted in a way that gave a bluish cast when underexposed even slightly). But accuracy wasn't necessarily what you were going for when shooting Kodachrome. When I was shooting film (long ago) Kodachrome 25 was the smallest grained film that was generally available while the nearest common Ektachrome was ASA 64 and had larger grain.

Re:Still labs around for color (and even real b/w)

[toddestan]

It's a good bet. My Grandpa shot Kodachrome in the 40's and early 50's. Then he got cheap and started shooting Ektachrome. The 50-60 year Kodachrome slides look perfect. The Ektrachrome slides from the late 50's to early 70's are all magenta, with the ones from the mid 70's to 80's (when he switched to C-41 print film) still have some green and blue but rapidly fading.

Re:Still labs around for color (and even real b/w)

[falconwolf]

I'm guessing there will be for a little while to come

E-6 "Ektachrome" processing? Sure. K-14 "Kodachrome" processing? Very unlikely.

Ah but as you note Kodachrome isn't the only positive film. Nor is Ektachrome the only E6, after I use my last roll of Elite Chrome I'll probably be using Fuji film. Provia, Sensia, or Velvia. From what I know Provia has smaller grain but it only comes in 100 ASA/ISO. I've used 50, 100, 200, 400, and 800 ASA film. I also want to try astrophotography using up to 1600 ASA, but I haven't broken out my telescope yet and tried it. I need to find a good place without light pollution.

Falcon

Re:Still labs around for color (and even real b/w)

[falconwolf]

People seem to like colour pictures a lot, personally I've always found that b/w pictures done properly will win every time.

While I like B&W I prefer to shoot colour. Colour film can always be printed, after development, in B&W but printing B&W film in colour will not add the colour.

The only thing that I like about digital photography is that you have the picture instantly. With say doing your own b/w pictures, there's something special about seeing it develop in your own lab and getting the balances right.

With a digital camera it's even easier to convert colour to B&W, just save as that. What you can do digitally versus film though is hand paint B&W photos, well you can paint B&W film prints too but it's not the same.

Falcon

Re:Still labs around for color (and even real b/w)

[networkBoy]

FWIW I've invested in a gelatin light source filter for E-4/E-6 slides. Allows me to add blue to the image in roughly == proportion to the magenta. Helps a lot.

Re:Still labs around for color (and even real b/w)

[treeves]

Are you using it to scan them, or just for viewing? Related: does anyone know an inexpensive way to scan 35mm slides? Doesn't have to be super high quality.

Re:Still labs around for color (and even real b/w)

[toddestan]

That'll probably work for slides that have degraded partially. The problem with many of my Grandpa's slides is that the ones from the 50's to mid-60's all the blue and green are completely gone, effectively leaving them as monochrome slides. So it's not just a matter of boosting the blues and greens back to where they should be (using a tool like PhotoShop), as there is no greens and blues left to boost. They can be colorized again, but using the same methods as you would employ to colorize a B&W photograph.

Re:Still labs around for color (and even real b/w)

[Anonymous Coward]

Both.
I use a coolscan V ED that has been modified.
Also, there is still blue any green in there, just exceptionally faint.
I'm working an an ImageMagik perl script to restore the magenta cast.

My first pass was a little _underwhelming_ got close to ok colors but ultra washed out.

Kodachrome is dead.

[mfarah]

Long live VELVIA!

Re:Kodachrome is dead.

[Call Me Black Cloud]

Mmmmm....colby, swiss, and cheddar, blended all together.

Re:Kodachrome is dead.

[catmistake]

Long live VELVIA!

Indeed. I always felt Ektochrome had a more intense color saturation and was sharper than Kodachrome at the same iso. Long live Fuji Film!

Re:Kodachrome is dead.

[budcub]

From the early 1990's on, Ektachrome had some excellent emulsions. I believe it was up until the mid to late 1980's when Kodachrome was king, before Fujichrome started to take over market share. Then Kodak spent most of its R&D on improving E-6 films (Ektachrome) and let Kodachrome alone.

I used a fair amount of Kodachrome when I first started with slides but mostly moved on to Ektachrome and Fujichrome before going digital. I found Kodachrome excellent for certain situations, like on a sunny beach or high noon on a summer day when other slide films couldn't handle the contrast. Kodachrome would soak up all the light without losing shadow detail. I read that even though Kodachrome didn't have the fine granularity of more modern slide films, it had a excellent accutance (edge sharpness) which help make up for that.

Re:Kodachrome is dead.

[TheTrueScotsman]

Indeed it does - in the same way that vomit has a more intense smell than lilac.

Re:Kodachrome is dead.

[catmistake]

and... let's not forget, Fujichrome was (is) less expensive, for the film and processing.

So, *will* it be missed?

[Entropius]

I shoot digital only so don't really have any experience with film, but was there actually anything about Kodachrome that made it unique (in a good way) and will have anyone mourning its demise (other than Paul Simon), or are the newer films universally better?

I've thought about borrowing my dad's OM-1 just to shoot a few rolls of Velvia, but have never gotten around to it. (I have a few OM-mount lenses that I use on digital.)

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[sexconker]

From TFA, Kodachrome processing involves different chemicals. These chemicals contain the actual dyes. Regular film has the dyes on the film itself.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Shinobi]

Durability/Longevity. All the quality photographic film can survive longer in storage than CD's/DVD's can. Even HD's have a higher deterioration rate.

But overall, with film, it still is the king when it comes down to absolute quality(Both in resolution and colour representation). A top-quality 35mm film with superb emulsion can reach pretty damn good resolutions(equalling todays top-of-the line DSLR's). Then you move up mid-format and large-format cameras and you get even more insane results.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Anonymous Coward]

He asked about the difference between kodachrome film and non-kodachrome films, not between film and digital.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[pak9rabid]

According to the Wikipedia article:

The additive methods of color photography, such as Autochrome and Dufaycolor, were the first practical color processes; however, these had disadvantages. The réseau filter was made from discrete color elements that became visible upon enlargement, and the finished transparencies absorbed between 70% and 80% of light upon projection, requiring very bright projection lamps, especially for large projections. Using the subtractive method, these disadvantages could be avoided.

It was an improvement over previous color film technologies in that it didn't require as much light to project the resulting image, and the resulting photos looked much better when blown up.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kodachrome has the distinction of being fairly fine grained (outmatched by modern films, but very good historically), having good colour realism, and being remarkably stable over long periods of time (many decades). You can pull a slide out of a collection that is 50 years old and as long as it was stored in darkness it will look like it was shot recently.

I always found it gave a little more "bluish" cast to images compared to my preferences, so it was never my favorite choice, but I still have hundreds of Kodachrome slides. Will anyone mourn the passage of Kodachrome? Probably. But given that I went completely digital years ago, I don't miss it much. I certainly don't miss the expense.

More details about Kodachrome at the usual wikipeida page.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[StikyPad]

What's a king without a kingdom?

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[alen]

for a long time digital quality was worse than film. it was good enough for most people, but not pro's. years ago when digital was still new our army photo guys got some $10,000 digital cameras in and they said the quality was no where near as good as regular film.

and i've heard some pro's say that film had faster exposure so you can shoot faster. my wedding photographer was a pro and one thing i learned when he took pictures is to take as many as you can as fast as you can and sort it out later. it's how all the pro's catch famous people in all the crazy poses and facial expressions. think all the GWB pics in the last decade

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[mcgrew]

RTFA -- Paul Simon was right. Colors especially come alive when you shoot on a rainy day, but are vivid and vibrant any time. Personally, I miss Kodachrome; digital photos don't have the spectrum (ar at least seem not to have the spectrum) of colors Kodachrome gave.

Unfortunately, you'll never get the chance to shoot with Kodachrome. Sometimes it's nice being a geezer; I wonder what my grandfather was able to experience that I'll never get the chance to?

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[CohibaVancouver]

but was there actually anything about Kodachrome that made it unique

I'm 43 and shot a lot of Kodachrome & Ektachrome in High School (1980 - 1985). WRT Kodachrome, it's exactly like Paul Simon says in his song - The colours were very rich and warm, particularly the blues, and the blacks were very, well, black. The developing process (called K-14) meant the film had almost no grain. The main limitations to the film was the very low ASA (ISO) rating. Even on a bright sunny day on the top of a snow capped mountain you were shooting Kodachrome 25 at F2.8 at 125th/second. Well, I exaggerate, but you get the idea...

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes there was a big difference in color over standard film. Much richer I guess you could compare it to bumping up the gamma while retaining the full range of contrast. It was for all reasons the best color film ever made... and as for Slides... that is the preferred choice for color film photography. I have worked with everything from 35mm to 11" x 14" view cameras. It was my preferred film for color but I mostly worked in Black & White...

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[GrumpySteen]

> I wonder what my grandfather was able to experience that I'll never get the chance to?

Polio epidemics.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Anonymous Coward]

If anything, digital cameras can be faster because they don't have a film transport to deal with. Nikon's D3s shoots at 9 frames per second.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[MightyYar]

Sometimes it's nice being a geezer; I wonder what my grandfather was able to experience that I'll never get the chance to?

Tuberculosis.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Brett Buck]

It was incredibly stable, the colors were very well-saturated but otherwise pretty accurate. The last version (kodachrome 64) was a little too contrasty for my tastes - I liked Kodachrome 25. You can't compare it to any digital until your pixels get smaller than a silver molecule, at least not any "35 mm" digital camera. Used to us it in 120 and just looking at them on a light table made you feel like a hero. "Kodachrome Red" was pretty famous, red always looked great. And it was perfectly well-suited for skin tones.

        The film that effectively put it out of business, Fuji Velvia, is spectacular for landscapes where it pumps up the color saturation, and has all the colors like Kodachrome did red. It's very warm as far as color balance goes, and skin tones are almost cartoonishly shifted. It's essentially useless for portraits because of that. But it's far easier to process and you can still get it processed locally. Dwayne's Photo has been the only place processing it for years, and if you took it to a shop, that;s were it eventually ended up. Typically in recent years the turnaround time is on the order of two weeks. E6, you can still get overnight.

          As far as I have seen, there's no real general-purpose replacement for Kodachrome. OR, rather, its digital - where the lack of image quality is offset by far superior color accuracy (much better on a general basis than ANY film) and easily manipulated and printed images.

        But the handwriting is on the wall for just about all 35mm. It's always been marginally acceptable for sports and photojournalism because it was cheap and the little cameras were reasonably portable. The lack of overall image quality compared to 120 or larger (other than in the hands of masters) didn't really matter for magazines or newspapers. But everything 35mm could do is more-or-less easier or better with digital aside from the image quality, and the image quality of digital (since the mid 00's) has been sufficient to the point that it didn't matter.

          When I go on photo trips, I now carry 4 cameras - a Canon point-and-shoot for quickies, a Nikon digital SLR for anything that moves, and two Yashica-Mats, one with Velvia 100 and one with Tri-X, for things that don't move. I will typically take the same shot with the Velvia 100 and the Nikon just in case, and meter the Yashica-mat shots with the Nikon (to back up spot meter readings).

      BTW, if you get out the OM-1, be sure and check the foam light seals on the back. I have a 1977 version and the foam is decaying severely. and bear in mind that you can't get the batteries for the meter any more - they make some replacements but most of them don't put out the right voltage.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Have Brain Will Rent]

Digital cameras still don't have the gamut of film - at least not consumer level cameras. And very few digital displays can even come close to displaying the full gamut of which film is capable.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[bitslinger_42]

Having been taking pictures pseudo-seriously (i.e. not a pro, but not just doing birthday pictures of my kid) for a couple decades, I can say that there are pluses and minuses to each.

Kodachrome was a really high-quality film. It had great grain characteristics, wonderful color reproduction, and extremely good shelf-life. It's been very popular with the NatGeo set because it worked so well for capturing things like sunsets on the Serengeti. On the down-side, it was only made in relatively low speeds, ISO 200 or slower, so it wasn't well suited for photojournalism, sports, kids playing in the back yard, etc. It also used a different chemical process from other films (C-41 for print, E-6 for most other slide films, K-14 for Kodachrome), and the chemical process was quite a bit more complicated than even other slide films.

Velvia is a nice film, as well, but it has a tendency towards super-saturated colors, so it has a different feel from Kodachrome.

Digital has come a long way over the years, but it still lacks the dynamic range, resolution, and color reproduction capabilities of film, particularly the specialty films like Kodachrome or Tech Pan. Despite that, it's much cheaper to shoot, easier to handle, easier to process, easier to print, and lends itself much more readily to the Web than film does, which is why I haven't shot a single roll of film in ten or twelve years.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Lumpy]

Get a better digital. The Fuji pro cameras produce Incredible color. I prefer the photos take on my S5 pro outperform in color my Canon D5. But a friends Hassleblad H4D-60 while sold as a "medium format" Digital it really is not I call it a larger than full frame insane resolution camera... But it produces photos that have a dramatic dynamic range and color range that cant be touched...

I wish I had his budget, but I dont like wedding photography let alone rich people wedding photography so I dont get paid $9K per weekend like he does.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[iluvcapra]

RTFA -- Paul Simon was right. Colors especially come alive when you shoot on a rainy day, but are vivid and vibrant any time.

It's probably because the ambient color temperature on an overcast day is higher and the clouds diffuse a broader spectrum... :)

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[aliquis]

Ken Rockwells scanned film vs digital camera images:
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/filmdig.htm

Film:
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/images/filmdig/4990scan.jpg
Digital camera:
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/images/filmdig/digital.jpg

"If you do fret the pixel counts, I find that it takes about 25 megapixels to simulate 35mm film's practical resolution"

Camera was a $700 Tachihara 4x5". lens SChneider Symmar 150 mm f/5.6, film Fuji Velvia, scanner a cheap Epson 4990.

2003, $1500 Microtek 1800f scanner:
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/images/filmdig/1800fscan.jpg
2005, $500 Epson 4990 scanner:
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/images/filmdig/4990scan.jpg

I don't know what digital camera he compared to.

film @ 2400 dpi: http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d200/images/film/2400dpi.jpg
Nikon D200: http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d200/images/film/KEN_5127-nn.jpg

http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d200/d200-vs-4x5.htm
Nice shots.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Digital cameras have gotten better, over time, particularly if you are willing to compromise on resolution, and don't go for the cheap seats(a high-quality sensor dumping images into a huge RAM buffer will be worlds ahead of a crummy sensor struggling to gather enough light, and dumping directly to a cheap SD card); but a good mechanical transport can be pretty damn fast(just ask Hiram Maxim...)

10FPS is totally doable for a pro film camera with a motorized transport(where the DSLR will really shine, if equipped with enough RAM buffer and a fast storage card, though, is sustained shooting. 10FPS is cute; but it will empty a 36 or even a 48 shot roll in under 5 seconds. A digital could easily be shooting into a multi-thousand frame storage device...)

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[vijayiyer]

As far as I can tell, the newer films have nothing better, other than a simpler, less toxic processing method. It has a very neutral, natural gamut, and the film is archival to boot unlike all other color films. It is silver based rather than dye cloud based.
Velvia is great for garish colors, but I'd rather do that in postprocessing.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[vijayiyer]

I shoot large format, and I've always wished I could have had a chance to shoot 4x5 Kodachrome. Unforunately, as far as I know, only Ansel Adams ever shot large format Kodachrome back in the 50s. I'm sure the transparencies are unbelievable to behold, even today.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Zerth]

And now, if you don't mind dropping $20k+ on a RED, you can take 12 MP pictures at 30 shots/second or 6 MP at 120 shots/second. Until you run out of disk, anyway.

Or if you don't want that many shots/second and want higher resolution, a Nikon D3x will do 24 MP at 5 shots/second for under $7k.

Yay, the future is here.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Lumpy]

A low end DSLR can beat 35mm film today. high end dslr's utterly kicks the crud out of 35mm in resolution.

The getting old Canon 5d Mark II is 21.5 megapixels which is 1.5 megapixels greater than the absolute best 35mm film+best camera+best lens can do. Honestly 90% of all 35mm film shots are less than 12megapixel in resolution due to low end glass and cameras as well as being processed less than perfect. And that's just the mid level stuff from Canon. high end digitals that reach the 60 megapixel mark utterly destroy 35mm film even when used with the best of everything.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[RandomFactor]

Wouldn't that be wheezer?

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Grizzley9]

So what you're saying is that all those scrap-booking parties the ladies have to save our best pics are really better than our fancy PC's.

How. Dare. You.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[smellsofbikes]

BTW, if you get out the OM-1, be sure and check the foam light seals on the back. I have a 1977 version and the foam is decaying severely. and bear in mind that you can't get the batteries for the meter any more - they make some replacements but most of them don't put out the right voltage.

I've made a couple replacement battery packs for these, using a quite small silver battery with very carefully selected germanium diodes to get the right voltage; it's possible to fit the combination of the battery and diode into the same form factor as the old mercury or other batteries. You need to get your voltage right to within about 50mV to make the meter accurate, but cheap diodes have enough variation you can manage this. (I'm not yet sure how their precision holds up long-term, however.)

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[GoatEnigma]

Don't fret, your kids will be able to experience old diseases thanks to the contributions of Jenny McCarthy and her world order of fruitcakes.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Maximum Prophet]

My great-grandfather used a camera that put negatives onto glass plates. (4x6 or 5x7) My mother had these contact printed. The resolution is astounding.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[VAXcat]

Mustard Gas

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[SnarfQuest]

I've thought about borrowing my dad's OM-1 just to shoot a few rolls of Velvia, but have never gotten around to it. (I have a few OM-mount lenses that I use on digital.)

Ummm, you can't just cram some cheese into a camera and expect good results.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[psydeshow]

Even on a bright sunny day on the top of a snow capped mountain you were shooting Kodachrome 25 at F2.8 at 125th/second. Well, I exaggerate, but you get the idea...

Big whoosh on that for anyone under 30.

Man, I wish my digital camera had an ISO 25 setting, or an equivalent sacrifice-everything-for-best-color mode.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Attila Dimedici]

Sometimes it's nice being a geezer; I wonder what my grandfather was able to experience that I'll never get the chance to?

Tuberculosis.

If you really want to, you can still experience tuberculosis. On the other hand, smallpox, that's a treat that, unless we get really unlucky, no one will ever have the opportunity to experience again (smallpox is considered to be extinct although there may be a few samples in deep freeze in various biological weapons research laboratories throughout the world).

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Anonymous Coward]

My experience was not at all like that. For blues and greens I liked Ektachrome, but I thought the grain structure stunk. Kodachrome was for reds and skin tones, but really it did all the colors beautifully, didn't it. A lot of people think Kodachrome was a high contrast emulsion. It was actually very low contrast; that's why it did so well with skin tones and flower petals and things like that. What they're thinking of is color saturation, not the same thing at all. (That was Velvia's wedge, to push saturation at the expense of "accuracy".) This was helped by the fact that Kodachrome has no grain. It has dye clouds that themselves have no granular structure. That's why Kodachrome fails so badly with under-exposure.

As an aside, I used this very old metric, where shutter speed equals 1 over the film ISO and apature is:
f/16 - Bright sun
f/11 - Hazy sun
f/8 - Cloudy bright
f/5.6 - Cloudy dark
f/4 - Open shade or backlight

If you knew your equipment you could easily shoot Kodachrome, a very unforgiving emulsion, with beautiful and consistent results.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Freultwah]

Resolution, maybe, but I've still yet to see a digital camera produce colours as well and vividly as slide film. Besides, there isn't really much point in having that many megapixels with 35 mm, the lenses aren't that sharp. Mid-format and bigger, maybe.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[turkeyfeathers]

I wonder what my grandfather was able to experience that I'll never get the chance to?

Your grandmother.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[bodland]

My OM-1 is in my camera bag...meter still works. I shot a couple rolls five years ago. I got it for Graduation in 1980. Great camera. It helped me through school, slide presentation for ornithology field study I did. It got me jobs. PictureMan, Sports writer, photographer, dark room tech at a county weekly and PR work for a big mountain bike race... I shot kodachrome long ago and loved it. It was all good. Now I snap with a iphone, Hipstamatic and Owle Bubo...and have no photo albums anymore...no slide shows...just a facebook of irreverent pictures from a disillusioned middle aged thing. I will miss Kodachrome. Sort of like I miss loved ones that have passed away. Fond memories...and then move on.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[D Ninja]

I wonder what my grandfather was able to experience that I'll never get the chance to?

Spanish Influenza

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm 43 and shot a lot of Kodachrome & Ektachrome in High School (1980 - 1985).

Yeah. When I look back at all the crap I learned in high school...

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Entropius]

The film-digital comparison is a tricky one.

As I understand it, because of the way film grain works, film has very good definition for fine high-contrast detail (which is somewhat above the Nyquist frequency of even the best FX sensors), but when you start talking about lower-contrast detail, the grain structure of the film obscures the detail.

So if I'm trying to read black type on white paper at a very long distance, I want film, but if I'm trying to make out low-contrast feather detail on a distant bird, top-end digital is better (if more expensive).

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes it's nice being a geezer; I wonder what my grandfather was able to experience that I'll never get the chance to?

Tuberculosis.

Nope, TB is back!

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[reub2000]

I recently did a project where about half was shot on 6x9 rolls of Kodak Portra 160VC, and the other half shot on a Canon 350D. Printed all of the images on 13x19 inch paper. While the film definitely had better resolution than the digital shots, the extra effort of scanning the film seemed to be hardly worth it. 35mm film has no place in the digital world as cameras that are about the same size can easily capture more resolution. Plus film that isn't stored properly will accumulate a ton a dust very quickly.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[John Whitley]

was there actually anything about Kodachrome that made it unique (in a good way)

As someone who has shot film and digital side-by-side, yes. Film isn't just "disposable digital sensor rolls." Each kind of film has unique working characteristics. To quote Pascal Dangin from this New Yorker article:

Dangin’s latest invention is a proprietary software package called Photoshoot. (He employs six full-time programmers at Box.) Its aim is to imbue digital photography with a specific sensibility—an opinion about the way pictures should look—of the sort that film once offered. “I am doing this because of necessity, because I believe the way that digital photography is done today is so wrong,” Dangin said one day. “Photography as we knew it, meaning film and Kodak and all that, was a very subjective process. With film images you had emotions. You used to go out and buy film like Fuji, because it was more saturated, or you liked Agfa because it gave you a rounded color palette.” With a ten-dollar roll of film, he explained, you were essentially buying ten dollars’ worth of someone’s ideas. “Software, right now, is objective. ‘Let the user create whatever he wants.’ Which is great, but it doesn’t really produce good photography.”

I'll elaborate on that "ten dollars' worth of someone's ideas" bit: It's very loosely akin to being able to choose from a set of experienced digital post-processing artists, each with a distinct look. Film companies put a lot of money into tuning the characteristics of each line of film, whether color or black and white, for the desired results.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[ModernGeek]

Unfortunately, you'll never get the chance to shoot with Kodachrome. Sometimes it's nice being a geezer; I wonder what my grandfather was able to experience that I'll never get the chance to?

The touch of a woman.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[falzer]

Well there's no question that 4x5" film scans are going to have more detail than miniscule-sensor-digital shots from 2003-2006. Even a full 35mm digital sensor is puny compared to 4x5" film.

The point of the site's author in the d200 vs 4x5 article is that you can get extremely good quality digital images by using a large format view camera and a film scanner for near (or better) the same price as a decent DSLR.

For your interest, compare 4x5 film to a large format digital sensor scan back:
film http://www.luminous-landscape.com/images36/AcrosFilm-Detail1.jpg
digital http://www.luminous-landscape.com/images36/BL-Detail1.jpg
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/cameras/better-light.shtml
Large format digital pictures are extremely competitive in quality to film.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[reub2000]

I used to shoot a bit of Pan F+. No color, but I used to like the silky smooth prints that I could get from even 35mm. I also doubt the film has enough dynamic range for a bright sunny day on the top a snow capped mountain. You actually had to use a tripod. Kids these days and their ISO6400 sensors and image stabilized lenses.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[BenEnglishAtHome]

Your grandmother.

Or to put it in terms more applicable today: "your grandmother when she was 15 and he was 20, minus the fear of being labelled a pedophile."

It amazes me sometimes how many things we've given up over the years. Nowadays we tolerate interference in our private lives that would have sent our grandparents reaching for a shotgun.

And that's not all. Your grandfather, as a kid, knew silence. At least, he knew something akin to silence where only the quiet sounds of nature could be heard. Nowadays? You can't escape the ring of cell phones, even hiking in a national forest.

Your grandfather, as a kid, might have experienced the sort of hand craftsmanship that made the U.S. the envy of the world. There was a time when a Stanley hammer, carefully crafted (though still mass-produced) by Americans, would be an object of outright lust for, say, a Japanese woodworker. Nowadays, if you want good tools you pay ridiculous money for German or Japanese (or whatever) semi-custom, semi-art objects or you make do with some barely usable, almost disposable Chinese mass-produced junk.

Since the topic was photography-related, I'll throw this one out: as a kid, I experienced mass-market cameras that were a joy to use because they had simple, easily understandable, mechanical controls directly coupled to the thing they controlled. Nowadays, even cheap cameras have idiotically bad user interfaces that only frustrate people who understand photography. What's the use of knowing the definition of "f-stop" if you have no way to set it? (I may take up large-format photography when I retire, just so I'll have some semblance of control over the capture process.)

I'd rather live today. Today, taken as a whole, things are better than they've ever been. But no progress is purely positive. There are plenty of things we've lost and for which we might reasonably envy previous generations.

Now, get off my lawn.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Will.Woodhull]

While parent post is true, it is also true that only commercial photographers could afford to take advantage of the wide color gamut and other great qualities of wet photography. In addition to the cost of the cameras and dark room equipment, there was also the cost of the 99 throw-away exposures for every good shot, and the thousands of lousy shots taken to get the experience to reliably get at least 1 good shot out of 100.

With digital photography the amateur can easily afford to take a 1,000 shots to end up with one really good one. He then can process it through a digital darkroom for no additional cost, and also recover some acceptable images from some of his almost-good shots to boot. He faces a lower absolute top limit on quality since digital photography does not have the color gamut or the fine resolution that is possible with wet photography, but he can get a lot closer to that limit than he could ever have managed in wet photography. He is immensely better off with digital photography than he could ever have been with wet photography.

I started getting serious about photography in high school, with my first Minolta range-finding 35 mm camera. It was a love-hate relationship for 25 years: I loved the concept of photography but hated that I could never manage to put together the darkroom that was needed to get anywhere with it. Early on, I could not afford the equipment. When I could afford the equipment, I found that dealing with the chemistries raised issues of child-proofing and environmental impacts that I did not want to get into.

I do miss wet photography, but with the mixed feelings one has for a cherished childhood dream that realistically could never have happened, no matter what. I am very happy with my digital cameras, general computer equipment, and The GIMP, especially now that my monitor and printer have the same color space.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[John Whitley]

To provide some concete figures here, 4x5 large format film (the smallest format considered "large") can be drum-scanned to produce images in the 200-300 megapixels equivalent range. Quadruple that for 8x10 film. Ultra-large format (ULF) formats are even larger, up to 20x24 inch film. Folks working with hybrid (analog/digital) processes with ULF mostly don't bother with full drum-scan resolution. Even for very large prints, there's just a stupidly large amount of information. And the real dynamic range and highlight behavior for black and white film blows all current digital sensors out of the water.

I had to laugh at that gigapixel photo of Obama's inaguration -- all sorts of artifacts along the stitch boundaries. A single wide-angle 8x10 (or hell, 8x20) image would have blown it away.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Optic7]

From what I've read (and I think seen as well) the answer is yes, Kodachrome does render color in its own special way, supposedly nice rich saturated colors.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[dunkelfalke]

Sounds like my Sigma DSLR.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Optic7]

Unfortunately, you'll never get the chance to shoot with Kodachrome. Sometimes it's nice being a geezer; I wonder what my grandfather was able to experience that I'll never get the chance to?

That's actually incorrect. Search the web: there's tons of Kodachrome on ebay right now, for example. Get it, shoot it, and process it fast though, because like the article says, the last place will stop processing it in December.

I happen to have a cartridge of Kodachrome Super 8 movie film that I plan on shooting.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Anonymous Coward]

TB is still available. As is Poli

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what my grandfather was able to experience that I'll never get the chance to?

Your grandmom?

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[mcgrew]

While parent post is true, it is also true that only commercial photographers could afford to take advantage of the wide color gamut and other great qualities of wet photography.

Not so. I had a Canon 35mm SLR in 1968, and the slides I took had far more realistic colors than digital photos do. I processed my own B&W film, but sent the color film to Kodak for processing, just like everybody else.

there was also the cost of the 99 throw-away exposures for every good shot

We were a lot more careful about composing a shot back then, since as you say, it cost, and now days every shot is essentially free. The only time one would waste film was at something like a ball game.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[epp_b]

Using Ken Rockwell as a reference for photography is like using Fox as a reference for news.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[CohibaVancouver]

Kids these days and their ISO6400 sensors and image stabilized lenses.

Yeah. They need to get off my lawn

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[epp_b]

Man, I wish my digital camera had an ISO 25 setting, or an equivalent sacrifice-everything-for-best-color mode.

I agree. High ISO is impressive, but I would totally buy a digital SLR with a sensor that could do conversely-low ISO.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[YouWantFriesWithThat]

not speaking to you directly, but if you only have one keeper out of a hundred it's time to find a new hobby.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think that the dynamic range and color range of a digital camera can't be touched, you've clearly never seen a Kodachrome or Velvia slide. Digital is king today because of the speed and convenience. That's it. Some of the high megapixel cameras are about to the resolution of 35mm film, but they can't touch the dynamic range. They're sometimes better for shadows, but film does much better in the highlights. There simply is no way to get a digital camera to do quite what Fuji Velvia will do. There are some Photoshop filters that come close, but they're not quite there.

I've never taken a color picture with a digital camera that I was really happy with. All of the best color pictures I've ever taken were on Fuji Velvia or Provia. I'm more comfortable in B&W, so I mainly stick to Ilford HP5+ and FP4+.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[mcgrew]

Some of those things I can still experience today.

Your grandfather, as a kid, knew silence. At least, he knew something akin to silence where only the quiet sounds of nature could be heard. Nowadays? You can't escape the ring of cell phones, even hiking in a national forest.

My friend Mike (the one I mentioned in an earlier comment who'd had polio as a kid) has fifteen acres outside Columbia, IL, and when we're in his woods, the only thing we hear is nature, ourselves, and occasionally our own cell phones. We can escape them by shutting them off. They never ring in his galvanized steel barn; the damned thing's a Faraday cage.

Your grandfather, as a kid, might have experienced the sort of hand craftsmanship that made the U.S. the envy of the world.

My dad, who's 79, makes pocket knives from scratch; no kits or pre-made parts or plans, no computer aids, anything. He's a hell of a craftsman; they're far better knives than you can buy.

What's the use of knowing the definition of "f-stop" if you have no way to set it?

Wow, you can't change the aperture of a modern digital camera? And here I was thinking about buying one. Bummer. Can you change shutter speed? If not, these cameras REALLY suck.

I'd rather live today. Today, taken as a whole, things are better than they've ever been.

I agree completely. I like my computers, cell phone, DVR and VCR, microwave oven, TV remote, etc. I don't miss carbon paper or black and white CRTs or drum brakes or carburators one bit.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[mcgrew]

LOL, I'm the father of two grown daughters. But I'm a geezer; back in the '70s a nerd could easily disguise himself as a hippie, and there were no fatal STDs that couldn't be cured with a shot of pennicillin, or unwanted pregnancy. Women would casually walk up and say "wanna fuck?" as casually as they'd walk up and say "wanna smoke a doobie?"

Of course, I'm probably old enough to be your grandfather. Who knows, unbeknown to both of us I may actually be!

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[mcgrew]

No, I'm old enough to remember polio epidemics. My friend Mike had polio as a child (he was left with a twisted arm and leg as a result), and he's ten years younger than me. OTOH there was no such thing as AIDS back then, nor antibiotic resistant bacteria.

I'm not saying I'd want to live in those primitive times; I had my tonsils removed in 1958. Knocked out with ether (aka automotive starting fluid), that stuff is NASTY. The vomiting in the recovery room caused an infection where the surgery was done. By contrast, when I had hemmoroid surgery in 2002 the anestesiologist said "ok, you're going to sleep now" and the next thing I knew I was in the recovery room with no ill effects at all.

Dr. McCoy would think today's hospitals are advanced compared to the Enterprise's sick bay, but remember that his Star Trek started in 1966. Things were still pretty primitive then even. The communocators (cell phones), self-opening doors, flat screen computers, etc were still far-out fantasy. Now they're so commonplace nobody ives them a second thought.

I'm only saying that there were likely some good things that no longer exist; one I can think of is gravity furnaces with power piles. I had one in a very old house I rented when my kids were growing up, and when the power went out because an ice storm tore down the power lines, you still had heat. And the heat was even; not blasts of hot when the blower ran followed by cold when it didn't. IINM that furnace was about thirty years older than me.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Ornlu]

Life without an electronic leash / cell phone?

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Besides, there isn't really much point in having that many megapixels with 35 mm, the lenses aren't that sharp. Mid-format and bigger, maybe.

Which is probably what the poster was talking about: 60MP high end digitals mid-format, like those made by hasselblad and phaseone.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[mcgrew]

Most likely that's true, but I have yet to see a digital photo of a rainy day that comes even close to a Kodachrome photo.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Have Brain Will Rent]

I agree - I started developing my own B&W film and contact prints by the age of 12. By 15 I had an enlarger I would set up in the bathroom. I wasn't rich I just had the usual jobs teenagers got at the time - mowing lawns, shovelling walks etc. Was it cheap? No, but it wasn't enormously expensive either. By 20 I had built a proper darkroom and by 21 a darkroom capable of tray processing colour prints. A couple of years later I had one of the first reasonably priced colour print processors. I was a university undergrad at the time with the typical undergrad income. Along the way I tried processing my own slide film but unlike B&W film and B&W and colour prints there wasn't really much to be gained over letting a lab do it so I stopped processing slide film myself. Buying a bulk loader and rolling your own 35mm film reduced costs considerably.

Yes it was more expensive than digital but as the parent points out we took a lot more care in composing and taking our shots. At the time pro's would usually say they got about 3 usable shots out of every 100 - they also had incredibly high standards (you had to have if you wanted to get in Nat. Geo. or Time) and frequently used motor drives. The number of good shots depended somewhat on whether they were shooting slide or negative with negative being a lot more forgiving of exposure problems than slide but not having some other good qualities of slide such as saturated colours.

I'm not sure which is better - having to limit your shots and thus learn careful composition or being able to cheaply take 1000's of shots and, at least potentially, learn through lots of mistakes. I think perhaps both. My wife learned through digital photography long after film became a rarity but I also encouraged her to use one of my old 35's partly to learn to have to compose carefully (and to remember to turn off the motor drive :) but also to see what it was like to have the much wider gamut of colours and to see what it was like to be using a good lens - even if it is old a good fast prime still beats most if not all of the lenses sold on consumer digital cameras today including the DSLR kit lenses - that's one reason you see 4/3 format digital camera owners snapping up Hexanon lenses for peanuts the last 2-3 years, they convert the mounting to use the lenses on their digital cameras.

And for resolution film can still beat out all but exotic digital cameras. A drum scanner will easily give you 40MB of good data from a 35mm slide or neg. And medium format, e.g. 120 film (about 2 1/4 by 2 1/4) would give you over 100MB. Large format (4x5 and up) can get you up into GB's of data. I have hundreds of B&W 120 negatives my Dad shot many decades ago - they are still in good shape and would probably still beat the output of most digital cameras today for resolution and probably density range too.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[mcgrew]

I'm old enough to remember TB; my uncle had it when I was a kid. Lost one of his lungs from it.

Damn, you kids are making me feel REALLY old, thanks a lot!

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[holmstar]

Wow, you can't change the aperture of a modern digital camera? And here I was thinking about buying one. Bummer. Can you change shutter speed? If not, these cameras REALLY suck.

Of course you can, but you may need to read the manual in order to figure out how.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[sorak]

RTFA -- Paul Simon was right. Colors especially come alive when you shoot on a rainy day, but are vivid and vibrant any time. Personally, I miss Kodachrome; digital photos don't have the spectrum (ar at least seem not to have the spectrum) of colors Kodachrome gave.

Unfortunately, you'll never get the chance to shoot with Kodachrome. Sometimes it's nice being a geezer; I wonder what my grandfather was able to experience that I'll never get the chance to?

Puberty, now get off my lawn!

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Achra]

I believe that this is the same battery that the old Minolta SRT's needed, and I found that installing the germanium diode under the bottom plate and using a standard 357 (silver-oxide version, not alkaline) with a small rubber o-ring around it was a perfect fit. The issue at hand here is that the old mercury cells put out something like a stable 1.35 volts throughout their entire lifespan and old camera meters used it as a reference voltage. Mercury cells are illegal now and have been for a long time, you cannot acquire them. Alkaline batteries are useless for these camera, alkaline batteries start out putting out nearly 2v and degrade over time, the output voltage dropping as the battery wears out. However, Silver-oxide batteries put out a stable 1.55v through their entire lifespan, and the trick is to put a carefully selected diode inline with the battery which will have a forward voltage drop of .2v and get your silver-oxide battery down into the mercury battery voltage. The other (easier, but more expensive) method is to by one of those air-zinc Wein cells, which are specifically designed to be drop-in replacements for mercury cells. The problem with those is that they don't last very long at all, once you open the air-tight seal on them they only last a few months.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[SETIGuy]

The point of the site's author in the d200 vs 4x5 article is that you can get extremely good quality digital images by using a large format view camera and a film scanner for near (or better) the same price as a decent DSLR.

Or at least it was five years ago you ignore the cost of film and processing. You can now get a decent DSLR for significantly less than the price of a $3000 film scanner.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[dangitman]

But overall, with film, it still is the king when it comes down to absolute quality(Both in resolution and colour representation).

No, it's not.

A top-quality 35mm film with superb emulsion can reach pretty damn good resolutions(equalling todays top-of-the line DSLR's)

The best 35mm film stocks don't come close to top-end DSLRs, in either resolution, color reproduction or dynamic range.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF ?!?!?

What are these '35' measurements I see bandied about - have you Usians gone all Metric, or started eating real cheese ;

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[dangitman]

Resolution, maybe, but I've still yet to see a digital camera produce colours as well and vividly as slide film

I doubt you've even seen the output of a modern digital camera. The color accuracy, saturation and dynamic range far exceeds that of film.

I worked professionally with film photography for years. It was terribly difficult to get good color, you have to use color-correcting filters or gels on lights to get accurate color. The color balance on film was very finicky. Shots would have to be perfectly exposed.

In contrast, with a digital camera shooting RAW format, you can easily modify color balance without loss. You can capture colors in spectrums (UV/IR) that were impossible without specialized film stocks.

Besides, there isn't really much point in having that many megapixels with 35 mm, the lenses aren't that sharp.

Good lenses are. That's why we pay the big bucks. And the lenses are still getting better with modern optical design.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[SETIGuy]

While parent post is true, it is also true that only commercial photographers could afford to take advantage of the wide color gamut and other great qualities of wet photography.

Not so. I had a Canon 35mm SLR in 1968, and the slides I took had far more realistic colors than digital photos do.

It depends upon what you mean by realistic. Slide film is probably better at representing the colors your brain remembers. The digital photos are probably better at representing the colors as they were. The brilliant colors of that sunset don't really look like that. The high contrast of the situation is making your brain do a contrast stretch and exaggerate the colors. The way films support large dynamic range is by giving up linearity. In contrast, CCD's are linear sensors that rely on translation tables to mimic film. Turn off those tables and you get an exact representations except where you've saturated the sensor. (Your camera may even support this.) What you'll get is a true representation of the light hitting the sensors. And it will probably look washed out, especially in print.

Anyway, if you're disappointed with the colors, go into you camera settings and boost the saturation a notch. Play with it until you find a setting you like.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[dangitman]

Digital cameras still don't have the gamut of film - at least not consumer level cameras. And very few digital displays can even come close to displaying the full gamut of which film is capable.

Bullshit. Digital cameras have a noticeably larger gamut than film.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[dangitman]

Digital has come a long way over the years, but it still lacks the dynamic range, resolution, and color reproduction capabilities of film,

Except for the fact that it doesn't. Digital beats film in every one of those characteristics.Where are people getting this misinformation from? It's like being back in 1998, when digital still had a long way to catch up with film. Those days are long gone.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[SETIGuy]

That's been true of film cameras for quite some time. But if you buy Nikon, nothing stops you from putting old non-AE non-AF lenses on it. The damn shame is that they've gotten rid of the old microprism and split-ring focusing aids, so you'll have to rely on the ground glass or turn on the electronic range finder. But changing exposure modes is pretty much the same as it was on my old Canon AE-1. Turn a knob to M if you want full manual exposure, A if you want to control the aperture, S if you want to control the shutter, P for "Programmed" mode.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Anonymous Coward]

CNN is far worse

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I wonder what my grandfather was able to experience that I'll never get the chance to?

Polio epidemics.

You missed out on Polio? Disease Tourism is your answer! Kenya, Soudan, and Somalia have all had outbreaks in the past 3 years.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Show me a DSLR with film-matching resolution which is the same size as a small 35mm rangefinder, something like a Canon 7 or a Leica. Or even a manual SLR like the Nikon RE or the Olympus OMs. One of film's few remaining advantages over digital is that the camera bodies are usually small and cheap. Professional DSLRs tend towards being big things with battery grips and massive wheels all over the place, and even the consumer cameras are still pretty large compared to medium sized film cameras.

The new EVIL cameras that are being invented at the moment might rival film for size, but they don't have real viewfinders and they will by no means be cheap.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[kimvette]

I've still yet to see a digital camera produce colours as well and vividly as slide film.

You have yet to discover post processing, just like you have to do with film, to achieve the final results. Digital Photo Professional, Capture NX, Adobe (Photoshop) Lightroom, Photoshop, and The Gimp are your friends. Think of them as developer+fixer. Think what I am suggesting is not a fair comparison? Read up on the C-41 and RA-4 processes. :)

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[BenEnglishAtHome]

God, I miss the 1970s.

At the university I attended, the most notorious freshman mixer had a standard dress code that was universally observed. Boys wore one tube sock, usually tied on with a discarded pair of shoelaces. Girls wore Saran Wrap; multiple layers and colored wraps were considered cheating. Both genders were allowed to wear shoes.

The organizers hauled in mattresses (some) and old sofas (lots) from all over to meet the demand of hundreds of essentially naked 18-year-olds, all crammed into one old gymnasium complex and consuming heroic quantities of alcohol.

Special, special were those days.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Freultwah]

Which is probably what the poster was talking about: 60MP high end digitals mid-format, like those made by hasselblad and phaseone.

He did only mention the 35 mm format, five times. He also said high-end digitals destroy 35 mm film. It's fair to assume he was talking about 35 mm across the board, since why would he want to compare 60x90 mm digital to 35 mm film?

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think more than one out of a hundred is a keeper you probably have low standards.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Anonymous Coward]

I also loved the colorful slides, holding sheet after sheet up to the sunlight and showing them to my friends in Alaska. Thousands of my shots were of the wildlife and commercial fishing ventures in Prince William Sound near Valdez. I think the processing chemicals were highly toxic to the environment though and a lot of it got dumped down the drains.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Freultwah]

I doubt you've even seen the output of a modern digital camera. The color accuracy, saturation and dynamic range far exceeds that of film.

Oh, I've seen them all right. However, if by "modern" you meant "top of the line, state of the art equipment that costs so much that you will not break even before the next one makes it obsolete", then no.

Good lenses are. That's why we pay the big bucks. And the lenses are still getting better with modern optical design.

Point taken.

I admit that at the end of the day, it still boils down to cost efficiency. You could squeeze quite many megapixels out of a 35 mm Fuji Velvia shot if you shoot with a Leica lens that costs mondo dineros and scan the film with some horribly expensive drum scanner. The data would be there, but at what cost?

Now, I do realise that I may come off as a bit schizophrenic here. Let me clarify. I do prefer slide film and maybe will always have a soft spot for it, I still think its colours beat digital, but I can no longer afford the time and the expenses it takes to mess around with it. I've all but given up on photography, until there is a good enough and affordable enough digital replacement to my film camera. So far, good enough has been well out of my price range and affordable stuff is still not up to par.

...and I still haven't got around to scanning some rolls I shot in 2005.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Landshark17]

There's a nice little add-on program for Photoshop called Exposure that will emulate all sorts of film stocks. Kodachrome, Portia, Velvia, Tri-X... hell, it'll even emulate Daugarrotype. Granted it's far from the real thing, but it does preserve the color palettes that give these film stocks their various personalities.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[SETIGuy]

The ISO setting is just a multiplier. It doesn't actually change anything in the sensor. If you want lower ISO than the camera can provide you can set to the minimum ISO and overexpose. If your camera has an ISO 200 setting and you want 25, then overexpose 3 stops. Then adjust the exposure back down in software if you haven't saturated. (You may actually have to write your own code to do this "right"). Or you can emulate a lower ISO by taking multiple exposures (in this case 8) at the normal exposure and using a median or average of the images.

The problem with CCDs is that they are too accurate in rendering colors and might not match the purposely distorted colors that come out of color film. If you're not getting the colors that you like it's because the built in color profiles in your camera aren't to your liking, not because the ISO is wrong. If you've ever manually developed color film you know that the resulting colors are strongly dependent on processing and printing. It's hard for an amateur to get professional lab quality results without a lot of practice. The same is true of digital photography. You're going to need to tweak your colors to get them right.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[bitslinger_42]

OK, I'll bite. Even though I don't think Wikipedia is authoritative for anything, this entry contains a better reference list than I could include here. To summarize, depending on the film, the spacial resolution of 35mm film ranges from 4 to 20 megapixels, but moderately-priced DSLRs (i.e. bodies around $1,000) are typically only managing nominal rates of 14-15 (i.e. raw number of photo sensor sites). Even on those bodies, diffraction introduces blurriness that reduces the effective spacial resolution achieved (a full-frame sensor that has 15 million photo sites has an effective spacial resolution of only 14.2 megapixels, and it gets much worse with smaller sensors). Comparing the output sharpness of my 6 megapixel Nikon D50 DSLR vs. my 12 megapixel Canon PowerShot D10, the D50 images appear sharper despite having only half the absolute number of photo sensors.

In terms of dynamic range, film can typically handle 9-10 stops (again, determined by film and processing used), but even if your digital camera can capture 16 bits/pixel (which most can't, RAW is usually 12 bpp), when you actually go to display your image, it's typically an 8 bit format (JPEG, GIF, etc.), which has just 8 stops of range. Again, the digital format is hampered by the various algorithms used to compress data, reproduce on monitors, etc., so while the file format may be able to contain more stops, digital displays are rarely able to keep up. Compression algorithms, particularly in JPEG files, do horrible things to gradients, as well.

Grain is an issue with film, albeit one that's well understood by those using it for art/career. In film, you can select different films to utilize different grain patterns that compliment the subject at hand. The equivalent issue for digital is thermal noise, which has been much harder to deal with, aesthetically, since it can vary depending on color (i.e. some cameras have more chroma noise in the blue channel, etc.), quality, and consistency. Also, while I can switch grain pattern easily with film by putting in a different kind of film (cost: $5-10/roll), doing the same with digital thermal patterns means buying A WHOLE OTHER CAMERA (cost: hundreds or thousands of dollars).

Despite ALL that, I still shoot digital exclusively, and have done so for ten years, because the technological benefits (no quality degradation over time, no processing costs, archival storage capacity, shot capacity per unit of volume within a camera, etc.) outweigh the imaging/aesthetic benefits of film.

I showed you mine, now you show me yours. Where's YOUR data to back up your claim that "Digital beats film in every one of those characteristics"? Or are you just spouting off about the old farts and their antiquated ways without actually bothering to have any facts?

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[YouWantFriesWithThat]

no, you are either a dick or you don't know what you are talking about.

i have twenty years of experience shooting on fully manual 35mm cameras. i take my time and only shoot when i am really happy with what i have in the view finder. for every 10 times i lift the camera and compose a shot i take maybe one frame. i am not trying to get my photos published in a magazine, but these days i am pretty happy with over half of my shots. the reason pros say that they are at a 1-3% keepers is that they are shooting dozens at each subject but aren't going to sell or show a series all taken at the same time. since i am shooting for me and no one else i can take one and get in my car and go somewhere else if i want to.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Will.Woodhull]

Not so. I had a Canon 35mm SLR in 1968, and the slides I took had far more realistic colors than digital photos do.

No, that's only correct if you are not taking the digital process through to its conclusion. Straight out of the camera, the digital image is rarely going to look as good as the slide that has been processed through a professional photo lab. But after proper treatment with the histogram and curves tools in the digital darkroom of your choice, the digital image will provide more color realism than Kodachrome slides usually did (they were consistently a little warmer and saturated than reality was). If you want the Kodachrome look, you can get that too: adjust to realistic, then use the HSV tool to boost the saturation a tad and add a slight red shift.

I grant that digital photography cannot match wet photography in absolute resolution, but it is in many ways better than wet photography for color, presuming that the photographer learns to use the software tools.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Will.Woodhull]

Parent post describes one way to do photography. It works, if your subject will give you the time do to the lengthy set-ups, and everything goes just right. It doesn't work for commercial photography. It doesn't work for the photographer attempting to capture candid shots. It doesn't work for wildlife photography. It doesn't work for several other types of photography

And it is a little too OCD for my taste.

There are two simple rules to becoming a good photographer:

1. Take lots of photos
2. Become ruthless in throwing out those that don't meet your highest standards

Everything else is just gravy. Learn your camera, learn your software, learn the media you will use in presenting your work (printer and paper, or web page image, etc). Learn all that stuff, and you'll get to where 3 or 4 of every hundred shots you take are keepers. If you get to where 10 out of 100 are keepers, you are passing up too many opportunities to experiment. You are no longer doing Art.

Now rescuing a poor but irreplaceable image is another story. Maybe the composition sucks and the technical quality is abysmal but if it is the only photo you've got of Junior's first steps, then of course you do everything you know how to make it as good as it can be made.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[dangitman]

OK, I'll bite. Even though I don't think Wikipedia is authoritative for anything, this entry [wikipedia.org] contains a better reference list than I could include here.

That article is horribly sourced. It even quotes Ken Rockwell, for Christ's sake - and he is just talking out of his ass, it's not like he did any real tests. Other sources are equally specious with people "estimating" resolution - why can't they just measure it?

To summarize, depending on the film, the spacial resolution of 35mm film ranges from 4 to 20 megapixels

It's nowhere near 20 megapixels for even good, fine-grained 35mm film stocks. A typical medium-speed stock is more like 6 megapixels.

And what does price have to do with it? If digital can beat film, then digital can beat film. You can get 20+ megapixel cameras reasonably affordably these days.

In terms of dynamic range, film can typically handle 9-10 stops (again, determined by film and processing used),

No, not really. 7 stops is more like the maximum for color negative film, slide film gets about 5 stops, and you can get close to 9 with some black-and-shite film and special processing. Modern digital in a RAW format is about 9 stops in color.

You can see this in practice. With a RAW file, you can recover highlights and shadows that would have been lost if you were using film.

Compression algorithms, particularly in JPEG files, do horrible things to gradients, as well.

Who the hell uses JPEG for professional shooting?

The equivalent issue for digital is thermal noise, which has been much harder to deal with, aesthetically, since it can vary depending on color (i.e. some cameras have more chroma noise in the blue channel, etc.), quality, and consistency

Noise in digital images is nearing the theoretical minimum for normal ISO ranges (100 to 400). Digital absolutely kills film on this metric. Look up studies done on noise on each, look at the graphs, the difference is staggering.

Also, while I can switch grain pattern easily with film by putting in a different kind of film (cost: $5-10/roll), doing the same with digital thermal patterns means buying A WHOLE OTHER CAMERA (cost: hundreds or thousands of dollars).

That's much easier with digital - because when you shoot at medium ISO ratings, noise is invisible, so you can add whatever grain pattern you like afterwards. With film, you're stuck with what you get.

Even with higher ISO ratings you get much less noise - moderns cameras give a similar level of noise at around 3200 ISO to what we would get n film at 400 ISO. And the digital noise is much more easily reduced in post-processing than film grain is.

outweigh the imaging/aesthetic benefits of film.

WHAT aesthetic/imaging benefits? There are none anymore. You can make a digital capture look like any type of film, but you can't get the quality of digital out of film.

I showed you mine, now you show me yours. Where's YOUR data to back up your claim that "Digital beats film in every one of those characteristics"?

Do some fucking research, don't you know how to use Google? Look for articles with actual test data and proper technique, not idiots spouting their nostalgic opinions. It's ironic that you chastise me for not linking to data, when your sole link is to a dodgy wikipedia article.

That, and you could try looking at the images. I've worked with thousands of images from both the film and digital eras, and it's perfectly obvious to the trained eye. We would have killed to get the results you can get today in the pre-digital world.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[rtfa-troll]

Unfortunately you are not right. There is a lower end of cameras where you can only choose between different modes (e.g. sport vs portrait) and even if you read the manual it's never entirely clear what these mean. Normally there's a similar model which does have a munual mode bur you have to be careful.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Using Ken Rockwell as a reference for photography is like using Fox as a reference for news.

A truer statement was never spoken.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[reub2000]

Well if your looking for something small, responsive, and feels solid, I doubt you'd find what you're looking for in a digital camera. However most 35mm film doesn't enlarge well past 8x10 prints, and you might be surprised at the quality you can get from a compact digital camera. However you'll be dealing with something that's mostly made out of plastic and will be as slow as a snail. If you have a 35mm camera that you like and a workflow that you like than just stick with it.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[falconwolf]

The best 35mm film stocks don't come close to top-end DSLRs, in either resolution, color reproduction or dynamic range.

Can you give any citations? There are pro photographers, those who make their living as photographers, who disagree with that. Here's wiki's article on digital vs film. And here's Photo.net's discussion. Ken Rockwell, quoted in the wiki article, has the article Why We Love Film. For instance regarding dynamic range he says:

"You want dynamic range? I got your dynamic range right here in this little canister. It's called film; a write-once, read-many (WORM) medium."

"I made this shot on a Contax G2 with a 21mm Zeiss lens at f/8 on Fuji Velvia 50, which was processed and scanned at the same time at NCPS. The dynamic range is so great that the hellacious sunbursts you see are just what's naturally coming off the diaphragm blade at f/8, as if 1,000 suns were shining in the lens in the two-minute exposure."

He further states "A frame of 35mm film, scanned cheaply at a good photo lab to a CD, is about equal to the resolution of a 25MP DSLR."

Falcon

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[falconwolf]

A low end DSLR can beat 35mm film today. high end dslr's utterly kicks the crud out of 35mm in resolution.

The getting old Canon 5d Mark II is 21.5 megapixels which is 1.5 megapixels greater than the absolute best 35mm film+best camera+best lens can do. Honestly 90% of all 35mm film shots are less than 12megapixel in resolution due to low end glass and cameras as well as being processed less than perfect. And that's just the mid level stuff from Canon. high end digitals that reach the 60 megapixel mark utterly destroy 35mm film even when used with the best of everything.

That just goes to show how much you know, Canon's highest res pro camera is the 21.1 MP EOS-1Ds Mark III. Even Nikon's D3x only has a 24.5 MP sensor. If you want bigger ones you have to step up to medium format cameras such as Hasselblad or Mamiya.

Meanwhile in pro photographer Ken Rockwell's article Why We Love Film he writes:

"You want dynamic range? I got your dynamic range right here in this little canister. It's called film; a write-once, read-many (WORM) medium."

"I made this shot on a Contax G2 with a 21mm Zeiss lens at f/8 on Fuji Velvia 50, which was processed and scanned at the same time at NCPS. The dynamic range is so great that the hellacious sunbursts you see are just what's naturally coming off the diaphragm blade at f/8, as if 1,000 suns were shining in the lens in the two-minute exposure."

"Not only that, but the film I shot in a Canon EOS Rebel G film camera, worth about $20 today, was sharper as scanned at NCPS than the file I made with the same lens on a Canon 5D, which is sharper still than anything on earth from Nikon digital."

"How about that? A $20 camera with a $5 roll of film and $20 to process and scan the entire roll is sharper than a $5,000 camera. (The Contax cost more, but still loads less than anything in full-frame digital.)"

Falcon

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[falconwolf]

I worked professionally with film photography for years. It was terribly difficult to get good color, you have to use color-correcting filters or gels on lights to get accurate color. The color balance on film was very finicky. Shots would have to be perfectly exposed.

And Ken Rockwell hasn't worked for years with film?

Falcon

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[dangitman]

Can you give any citations? There are pro photographers, those who make their living as photographers, who disagree with that. Here's wiki's article on digital vs film [wikipedia.org].

Perhaps you could read one of the only serious tests linked from the (very poor) Wikipedia article that you cite: Dynamic Range of an Image

Ken Rockwell, quoted in the wiki article, has the article Why We Love Film

Ken Rockwell is a hack with no credibility, and no test data to back up his statements. I don't know why anybody takes him seriously.

"I made this shot on a Contax G2 with a 21mm Zeiss lens at f/8 on Fuji Velvia 50, which was processed and scanned at the same time at NCPS. The dynamic range is so great that the hellacious sunbursts you see are just what's naturally coming off the diaphragm blade at f/8, as if 1,000 suns were shining in the lens in the two-minute exposure."

Well, that's an odd statement, because Velvia only has about 5 stops of dynamic range, compared to around 10 for modern digital cameras.

He further states "A frame of 35mm film, scanned cheaply at a good photo lab to a CD, is about equal to the resolution of a 25MP DSLR."

That is completely laughable. Even the best 35mm film exposures aren't capable of that resolution, especially not one that was "scanned cheaply."

You ask me for citations? Then tell me what Ken Rockwell's citations are. They don't exist.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[falconwolf]

Velvia only has about 5 stops of dynamic range, compared to around 10 for modern digital cameras.

Looking at your clarkvision page, the Velvia graphic (Figure 4) is not there. However Fuji's Provia 100F is better. The bad part is it comes only in 100 ASA. Here's a discussion on Velvia on Flickr.

You ask me for citations? Then tell me what Ken Rockwell's citations are. They don't exist.

I asked for citations because you stated digital is better than film. I want proof before I'll believe it. Even pros don't agree on which is better, digital or film. But it doesn't matter if the only ones worth a dime are the ones you agree with.

Falcon

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[petermgreen]

I wonder if another option could be to add a regulator IC of some sort and power it from an alkaline cell.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[mcgrew]

Puberty was 45 years ago. You get off MY lawn!

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[dangitman]

Looking at your clarkvision page, the Velvia graphic (Figure 4) is not there. However Fuji's Provia 100F [luminous-landscape.com] is better. The bad part is it comes only in 100 ASA. Here's a discussion on Velvia on Flickr [flickr.com].

And similarly, there are better digital cameras now than the ones used in these tests. And you need to cherry-pick low-speed film stocks to even have a chance of coming close to digital. In the real world, you don't always shoot at low speeds in controlled conditions.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what my grandfather was able to experience that I'll never get the chance to?

Your grandma's blowjobs? (well, unless you're from Arkansas of course)

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[aliquis]

I know people don't like him, or shares his ideas, though I can't see how the images can "lie"

And even if _HIS_ DSLR in those images was an old one (the scanner is to ..), I assume the point still holds, that 4x5" film outperforms APS-C (?) sensor DSLR cameras in sharpness.

Whatever that mean better images, in all other aspects and mean anything or is the right tool for the job and so on is another thing.

Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[falconwolf]

And similarly, there are better digital cameras now than the ones used in these tests. And you need to cherry-pick low-speed film stocks to even have a chance of coming close to digital. In the real world, you don't always shoot at low speeds in controlled conditions.

You're doing the same you just accused me of, "cherry-pick". Just as there are better new digital cameras now, you're cherry-picking, there are better film stocks as well. If you can't admit that I see no reason to continue this.

Falcon

Momma dont take my kodachrome away

[Combatso]

Kodachrome, they give us those nice bright colours They give us the greens of summers Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph So mama don't take my Kodachrome away

If you took all the girls I knew when I was single Brought 'em all together for one night I know they'd never match my sweet imagination Everything looks worse in black and white

Re:Momma dont take my kodachrome away

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.youtube.com/user/atimetoremember#p/u/4/SExsuRIGAlg

Re:Momma dont take my kodachrome away

[swanzilla]

Kodachrome, they give us those nice bright colours They give us the greens of summers Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph So mama don't take my Kodachrome away

If you took all the girls I knew when I was single Brought 'em all together for one night I know they'd never match my sweet imagination Everything looks worse in black and white

Ah...I see what you did there. Good job.

Re:Momma dont take my kodachrome away

[countSudoku()]

For you Simpson fans out there; The very last shot is of Steve McCurry picking up his photos at Dwayne's.

Momma don't take my Kodachrome Away!!

[Psychofreak]

Momma don't take my Kodachrome away!
Simon and Garfunkle

Kinda sad to see the end. Digital is so easy and high quality it is not unexpected. I am sure small batch processing will still be available, but that means you need equipment, chemicals and the knowledge how to use it.

Phil

Re:Momma don't take my Kodachrome Away!!

[OzPeter]

Momma don't take my Kodachrome away! Simon and Garfunkle

Kinda sad to see the end. Digital is so easy and high quality it is not unexpected. I am sure small batch processing will still be available, but that means you need equipment, chemicals and the knowledge how to use it.

Phil

Film photography is not going to go away in the same way that painting didn't go away when photography was invented.

Its funny that the whole relationship between dig and film photography (is it proper photography etc) is echoing the painting/photography debate of a century ago (is it art?)

Re:Momma don't take my Kodachrome Away!!

[LaminatorX]

Small batch Kodachrome processing is simply not possible. It's a 25 step process, generally overseen by an actual chemical engineer. The smallest it ever got was when they'd have lab set up in the back of a semi-trailer to do on-site processing at the World Series, Kentucky Derby, and similar events.

OTOH, the E-6 process used to develop Ektachrome/Fujichrome slide film can be carried out in a small home lab, and commercial processing is still widely available.

Re:Momma don't take my Kodachrome Away!!

[Starcom8826]

Kodachrome is by Paul Simon.

Re:Momma don't take my Kodachrome Away!!

[MightyYar]

Kinda sad to see the end. Digital is so easy and high quality it is not unexpected.

Digital isn't what killed Kodachrome... better film did. You can still buy (better) slide film.

Re:Momma don't take my Kodachrome Away!!

[Lumpy]

Until medium format Digital becomes more sane and really up's the resolution... film ain't going nowhere.

Even low end DSLR's like the T2i now have better resolution than 35mm film. (yes they do, I shoot both and that camera even kicks the hell out of 50ISO slide film for resolution.) As I have seen myself by scanning negatives and slides taken by really expensive cameras and glass.. Current cheap digitals exceed 35mm film.

but medium format is another matter.. 70mm is astounding still and I have yet to see any medium format digital get anywhere near what a cheap 1960's used camera can deliver. I have an old 220 that is 10 years older than I am and it produces insane photographs.

I look forward to the day when I can get a decent medium format digital...

Re:Momma don't take my Kodachrome Away!!

[Firethorn]

You can still buy (better) slide film.

I'd have to agree; Long before digital Kodachrome had become something of a niche market.

Many of those who used it did so for the same reasons some people prefer tube amps over digital ones.

Sure, it's a distortion; but it's a pleasing distortion.

Still, I'm sure somebody will come out with a 'kodachrome' filter that can render your images to look more like kodachrome in post-process.

Re:Momma don't take my Kodachrome Away!!

[hedwards]

That's not an accurate portrayal. For all intents and purposes digital and film are the same as far as the end product goes. In fact the local camera shop develops them the same way. There's a step where they transfer the digital image onto real film, but after that the whole process is exactly the same. These days you don't even need to do that because printers have gotten to the point where they're superior to film prints.

But more than that, since the end product of painting is so much different than alternatives, there's always going to be a market. Film cameras just don't do anything that's different enough from digital to guarantee that to be the case.

Re:Momma don't take my Kodachrome Away!!

[OzPeter]

but medium format is another matter.. 70mm is astounding still and I have yet to see any medium format digital get anywhere near what a cheap 1960's used camera can deliver. I have an old 220 that is 10 years older than I am and it produces insane photographs.

I look forward to the day when I can get a decent medium format digital...

This is the reason why I am in the market for a decent, used RZ-67 (to supplement my Holga!). As a hobbyist I can't afford the $$ to compete on that level with Dig.

But even though I am looking to MF in the short term I am almost starting to desire large format. Dig competing against 8x10 film would be an insane amount of $$, but even when Dig does catch up, you can't emulate the optics of a LF camera in a straight SLR format. I just had a thought - perhaps you go stereo/3D in the Dig camera and do a lot of post processing to emulate the image falling on the film plane.

Sniff .. In one sentence I think I just condemned LF photography and generated a masters/PhD topic for some fresh face kid who is going to go out an make billions in the camera market with his new startup company.

Re:Momma don't take my Kodachrome Away!!

[vijayiyer]

And even more so for large format. I have a 12000 x 10000 pixel drum scan of a piece of film I shot, and there's no digital option that is even remotely affordable to a hobbyist that could compare.

Re:Momma don't take my Kodachrome Away!!

[RDW]

'The smallest it ever got was when they'd have lab set up in the back of a semi-trailer to do on-site processing at the World Series, Kentucky Derby, and similar events.'

They actually got as far as building a commercial Kodachrome minilab ('Requiring only 46 square feet of floor space, the K-LAB Processor can fit through a standard 32-inch doorway') that automated the whole thing:

http://www.kodak.com/global/en/consumer/products/klabs/index.shtml

Unfortunately it never caught on, though someone has/had one for sale:

http://www.rockymountainfilm.com/equipment/klab.htm

(worthless without support and consumables from Kodak, of course).

Re:Momma don't take my Kodachrome Away!!

[Brett Buck]

No, actually, it's precisely the opposite. The other films (Velvia, primarily) are favored precisely because they distort reality. Velvia is particularly inaccurate - take a picture of one of your Hispanic friends and see what the skin tone looks like. Then do the same with Kodachrome, and with a Nikon DSLR. The Nikon will be almost perfectly accurate, the Kodachrome will be almost as good with the very slightest greenish cast, and the Velvia will look like you spray-painted her face with Candy-Apple Red car paint.

              Kodachrome was arguably the most accurate slide film. The problem is, digital color accuracy is better than any film, and people who still shoot slide film are doing it for the artistic qualities, not documentation, and like and can take advantage of the distortion of reality provided by Velvia. Reality is generally quite boring, artistically.

          Another factor, not relevant to the average amateur, is that Velvia is available in a variety of formats 35mm, 120, 4x5 (and maybe 8x10) so you can get the same results in many formats. Also, the processing of Velvia is far cheaper and E6 processing has been far easier and more available for 30 years. That's the only thing that kept Ektachrome alive over the years - for most of its history, it has been useless crap, and was never the first choice, used only when you had to get it processed quickly or wanted to do it at home.

Re:Momma don't take my Kodachrome Away!!

[Kjella]

Until medium format Digital becomes more sane and really up's the resolution... film ain't going nowhere. (...) Even low end DSLR's like the T2i now have better resolution than 35mm film.

The T2i is 18 MP, so if we say 15 MP is equal to 35mm then 4x15 MP = 60 MP should be equal to 70mm. Today you can get a full-size medium format 60MP digital back, the downside is of course that it costs $40000. Still you also get all the advantages of digital such as no film cost, no processing cost and no delay in seeing the results. Oh and the article claims much better ISO too. At a rate of almost 1 fps. Not saying this is for everyone, and digital has always been fairly expensive for the first picture, but it makes me fairly certain that in another ten years even medium format film is dead.

Re:Momma don't take my Kodachrome Away!!

[Lumpy]

I'm certain that in 5 years we will have affordable (read that as $5500.00) 60mp medium format digitals.

Outside of older used gear medium format has been an expensive hobby. but I see the speed that digital is going and I can see a real medium format digital camera entering at a really reasonable price within 5 years.

Re:Momma don't take my Kodachrome Away!!

[Firethorn]

The other films (Velvia, primarily) are favored precisely because they distort reality. Velvia is particularly inaccurate - take a picture of one of your Hispanic friends and see what the skin tone looks like. Then do the same with Kodachrome, and with a Nikon DSLR. The Nikon will be almost perfectly accurate, the Kodachrome will be almost as good with the very slightest greenish cast, and the Velvia will look like you spray-painted her face with Candy-Apple Red car paint.

Huh... I was going off the posts of a semi-professional photographer who went into the color details of how Kodachrome was 'brighter' than reality. Perception can be weird, I know.

VELVIA is dead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Long live VELVEETA!

Re:VELVIA is dead.

[natehoy]

"Say CHEESE!"

Rolls of Kodachrome

[ceswiedler]

If you have any rolls of Kodachrome sitting around not yet exposed, better expose them before sending them to Dwayne's before December 10, 2010.

Re:Rolls of Kodachrome

[BenFenner]

Your pedantry is like a breath of fresh air.
No sarcasm intended.

Re:Rolls of Kodachrome

[Combatso]

Took me a minute to figure out what you were saying. Good observation.

Re:Rolls of Kodachrome

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol status: Loled

Oh shit....

[Anonymous Coward]

I need to develop that last roll of film.

kodachrome

[jamesyouwish]

What is Paul Simon going to do....

Re:kodachrome

[jav1231]

He can't blame Mama for this one.

In the silence that followed...

[ElectricTurtle]

... the only sound that could be heard was a solitary giggle from...

PowerPoint!

Re:In the silence that followed...

[MightyYar]

PowerPoint!

I used to send all of my PowerPoint presentations out to a lab to get transferred to Kodachrome slides. Now what the hell am I going to do?

Re:In the silence that followed...

[ElectricTurtle]

Whoever marked this as a troll post has obviously never heard of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England (and his warts).

wow just dumb....

[Lumpy]

""All this is going to be discarded," McCurry said of the processing equipment for Kodachrome,"... so it's just a piece of history. It's nostalgic. It's kind of sad. I have about 800,000 Kodachrome images in my lab and these will be the last.""

That same equipment can be used to process other 35mm film. discarding it instead of selling it or giving it to a person or company that can use it is purely dumb.

Film is not gone, there are several places still making 35mm film. and a lot of places still processing it.

Re:wow just dumb....

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe his equipment is reaching the end of it's life, and the cost of maintaining it is too expensive compared to a moderned equivalent. I doubt this guy would just walk away from his photolab & throw it in the landfill unless it was knackered.

Re:wow just dumb....

[Concerned Onlooker]

"That same equipment can be used to process other 35mm film."

Not likely. The K-14 process is very different from everything else. I would bet that by the time you retrofit the machine you could have purchased a new Refrema, which I think is still the industry standard for dip and dunk processing.

Re:wow just dumb....

[Brett Buck]

Not even close to correct. The equipment is essentially unique and not at all like any other processing system. That was always one of the issues - there was never going to be anything like "1-hour processing" for Kodachrome, the process is two orders of magnitude more difficult and fussy than anything else.

Re:wow just dumb....

[Firethorn]

That same equipment can be used to process other 35mm film. discarding it instead of selling it or giving it to a person or company that can use it is purely dumb.

Can it? From my readings kodachrome was a rather different process than other films. In another fashion it's been legacy for a while; it may not be worth it to use it to process other 35mm films because newer, cheaper, more efficient machines exist for processing those films, the equipment was kept around solely to keep processing kodachrome because the newer machines couldn't without uneconomical modification.

Dwayne's must be getting a lot of strange calls

[JavaRob]

I live in a small rural village in central France. Two weeks ago the owner of a small photo shop in a nearby town asked me for help -- he had a customer who had dropped off film to be developed, and no place in France developed Kodachrome anymore... so he needed me to help him call Dwayne's Photo in KS, and give them his credit card details in English (thanks for your help, Krystal). It definitely struck me as odd at the time that the one place in the world he'd found to develop this film sounded like a tiny operation, but obviously his research was good....

There's a whole world out there, with Kodachrome film scattered throughout -- not everyone has an American living nearby who can help them make the call. I wonder what kinds of other calls they're fielding now.

Re:Dwayne's must be getting a lot of strange calls

[Anonymous Coward]

Kodachrome can still be developed into black and white photos. Rocky Mountain photo has been doing it for years, with older Kodachrome films that aren't compatible with the "current" K-14 process.

I would have my film processed...

[Anonymous Coward]

but momma took my Kodachrome away.

Film rules

[freelunch]

Kodachrome died for a few reasons, but in large part because better films came along. Fuji's Velvia being one of them. I LOVE shooting film. It's also interesting how long some of the best engineered films will last, compared to dvds or hard drives.

I shoot medium format film (6x7 cm, about 9000x11000 at 4000dpi, 550MB 16 bit compressed tiff). And while I love digital for some things (spray and pray, and low light action), interpolated digital doesn't come anywhere close to what is captured on a transparency. Though getting all that greatness off the transparency is difficult. But when done right, even a $10 20x30" print from costco or elcocolor can be spectacular.

I currently scan with a Nikon 9000. I'd kinda like to get together with some folks to work on an open source drum scanner project. Drum scanning with a photomultiplier tube (or similar) is a great alternative to the deficiencies of CCD sensors.

I also like prints. While it is nice to view images on a screen, they don't become tangible until they are embodied in a print.

And, btw, digital images archived on common photo sharing services rarely have enough resolution even for a good 8x10" print (300dpi). So I don't think that is viable.

Re:Film rules

[Eric in SF]

Have you *used* any of the common photo sharing services? I use Flickr. The clients I've worked with that download full 12 megapixel images from my Nikon D90 and 60mm micro-nikkor images would take exception to your resolution characterization.

Flickr *does* has a limitation of JPG only, 20 megabyte maximum per file. I save everything at JPG compression level 12 (i.e. almost no compression) and only the most detail-rich images save out greater than 20megs.

I've had full double-page spreads printed from images the magazine downloaded from Flickr.

It's OK to be stuck in the past (I hate Facebook and Twitter, personally) but dude, at least understand what you're missing out on!

And yes, I've shot Kodachrome and wish my D90 produced images with that 'feel'.

Re:Film rules

[Anonymous Coward]

It's OK to be stuck in the past (I hate Facebook and Twitter, personally) but dude, at least understand what you're missing out on!

Nice dig. Sure, I've used them. It's great that they meet your simple needs, but why would I want to archive in anything but raw or tiff? Why would I want to risk that the service changes their ToS, UI, or otherwise decides to charge me/monetize my images? I've hosted my own online galleries, with no third party limitations or privacy concerns, for over ten years. Being able to rsync to my own host, and create galleries with my own scripts? Pretty handy.

I shot about 12,000 digital images on my last vacation (3 months of sailing in BC and Alaska), and about 70 rolls of medium format film. Flickr as my archive source? No thanks.

Sad news ...

[PPH]

... I'm reading as I'm going to pick up my latest rolls of E-6 slide film (that my local shop still develops with a one hour turn around).

Re:Sad news ...

[bbqpope]

wow, my lab only runs e-6 and c-41 twice a week now, but they do any size film from 8x10 to 110..... http://www.burne.com/

When I think back

[Anonymous Coward]

on all the crap I learned in high school, its a wonder that I can think at all.

Color palette

[AnonymousClown]

Every film has its own color palette and many folks out there really love Kodachrome's.(There's quite a few sites out there that compares films if you want to see for yourself.) Personally, I never saw what the big deal was and I prefer Elite Chrome or Sensia when shooting slides and Portra VC for print.

There's also a big fanatical following with FUJI Velvia 50 - all those really saturated sunsets that you never have seen in real life are many times shot with that stuff. Of course today, you just run your raw image through PS and get the same effect.

Makes you think all the world's a sunny day

[Anonymous Coward]

Mama don't take my Kodachrome away

I've known Dwayne's since the 1970's

[TheHawke]

It's a cozy little portrait studio/camera shop located on the Parsons Plaza. Very comfortable, with outstanding portraits of Dwayne and his family gracing the walls. When I would visit when I was little, they were very nice. I got portraits done of me and family too.

Yes, it is a small operation, but it's also a family business. Patronize them as much as you can folks, they are good at what they do.

Re:I've known Dwayne's since the 1970's

[OlRickDawson]

No, Dwayne's photo development is on 32nd street. I went to school with the twins girls. You are thinking of a different photo place on the plaza, but I can't remember the name.

Put it next to the biplane in the garage...

[cyn1c77]

I am having a hard time understanding the media excitement over this "milestone."

You can still buy and develop other films that are considered superior to Kodachrome. Meanwhile, you can also simultaneously use a DSLR and operate in a fully digital fashion. The only people who are losing out are the ones with undeveloped Kodachrome in their cameras.

Re:Put it next to the biplane in the garage...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am having a hard time understanding the media excitement over this "milestone."

You can still buy and develop other films that are considered superior to Kodachrome. Meanwhile, you can also simultaneously use a DSLR and operate in a fully digital fashion. The only people who are losing out are the ones with undeveloped Kodachrome in their cameras.

It's because Kodachrome film is iconic in the world of photography. Imagine if Chevrolet announced that it would no longer produce the Corvette. There'd be a big to-do made about the last one produced because it's the friggin Corvette. This is the same sort of thing, just in the film world.

Re:Put it next to the biplane in the garage...

[rabidlemur]

There is no film that does what Kodachrome does - there are films that do things differently, "better" in some terms, but Kodachrome responded to a photographer who knew what they were doing in a unique way, the same as a certain pigment of paint did with a painter, or emacs vs. vi. It's notable in it's passing for two very important reasons - 1. Kodachrome introduced the world to color in photos, and 2. Kodachrome was a fascinatingly complex technology, invented by two guys that are the epitome of what we used to think of as American ingenuity.

Re:Put it next to the biplane in the garage...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's still the passing of an era. It's an emotional milestone, not a technological one.

Re:Put it next to the biplane in the garage...

[zunipus]

"You can still buy and develop other films that are considered superior to Kodachrome."

No actually. I'd go so far as to state your comment is profoundly ignorant. Kodakchrome was a patented film that used permanent dyes that did not fade with time and provided far more vibrant colors than any other color film in history. Read up on it. Do your homework.

Meanwhile, digital is here and you can make just as spectacular pictures with it. And, if stored correctly, digital data doesn't fade with time either. I loved Kodachrome, but I like digital better, thank you.

Re:Put it next to the biplane in the garage...

[BitZtream]

Thats because you've made assumptions about Kodachrome that are simply wrong.

Digitals don't compete with it yet, and you could debate for years over 'better' films.

Kodachrome and its processing is pretty much like nothing else and the result is a slide that will last for 50 years and look exactly the same as it did the day it was developed. Blacks don't fad, blues 'pop'. You won't find other films that have its vibrance and its longevity.

Re:Put it next to the biplane in the garage...

[Rhesusmonkey]

If the difference is that striking, then why is there so small a market for developing the film? Truth is 98% of of photos taken only have to have enough resolution to allow a lolcat macro. People are blind, I can't believe it's not butter eating philistines.

Hard disks as good as tape

[scharkalvin]

Hard disk storage should be as good as tape, they are BOTH magnetic media and the aluminum platters should hold up better than the plastic backing tape is made of. This would mean only powering up the disk when actually being accessed. The weak points are the capacitors on the disk circuit boards, and the lubrication on the bearings of the moving parts. Since the inside of the disk is in theory sealed the lube shouldn't dry out. So that leaves the capacitors on the circuit board as the only thing to fail while the disk is sitting idle and powered down. If the disk was fitted with a 'soft start' circuit to limit inrush current and never subject to vibration while being accessed storage life of the contents should be quite long.

Re:Hard disks as good as tape

[Anonymous Coward]

Lead-Free solder might last 15 years if you are lucky.

Re:Hard disks as good as tape

[networkBoy]

HDD HDAs are not sealed.
There is a vent to allow equalization of pressure.

Re:Hard disks as good as tape

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

HDD firmware, though, is typically stored in flash, and an HDD with blank or corrupt firmware is a paperweight...

Re:Hard disks as good as tape

[sznupi]

Types of capacitors used in HDDs, which seem to be from the more durable types (isn't the decay in those primarily from operation anyway?), might fare at least as good as mechanical elements...

Date

[Anonymous Coward]

They will process them until the end of December. Not December 10th, even Dwayne's site which is linked in the summary confirms this. I guess no one actually reads anymore. Surprise, surprise.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Video About it

[Grizzley9]

A video about it from the Today Show: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26184891/vp/34172096#34172096

Slides made crappy prints

[wsanders]

The problem with slides is that the dynamic range, especially of Kodachrome, surpassed that of prints, so the prints were crappy looking. You had two choices:

1) Make a contrast-reducing mask, used along with an internegative, for a "type-C" print, the same kind of print made from negative stock. Of course the intermediate processes reduced the fidelity of the resulting print, but if you went to a good lab the results were pretty good and very pricey.

2) Use Cibachrome or some positive process print. Ciba prints always looks murky and strange to me (I can immediately spot them in a gallery). Other positive process prints had unstable dyes, at least until the 80s or so. I can still tell my positive process, direct-from-slide prints from my Type C ones.

A third alternative was to scan them in. This was easy when you worked for National Geographic :-) For us mere mortals, decent sub-$5K slide scanners didn't really exist until about five years ago.

Still, I shot nothing but slides (when I shot color and not BW), and used nothing but Kodachome if I could. All my Kodachrome slides, dating back to the 70s, look as good now as the day they came back from the lab.

Re:Slides made crappy prints

[pomakis]

All my Kodachrome slides, dating back to the 70s, look as good now as the day they came back from the lab.

... or your eyes and the slides are degrading at the same rate.

Re:Slides made crappy prints

[wsanders]

Ha !

Actually, a good question. I don't think color perception degrades with age. Ability to focus does. So those blobs of color still look as good as they did in the .....

Re:Slides made crappy prints

[theshowmecanuck]

All my Kodachrome slides, dating back to the 70s, look as good now as the day they came back from the lab.

That makes me wonder. How long will a digital picture last in archival quality when stored on a hard drive if it isn't accessed very often. For example if you knew you needed a particular stock photo that was on Kodachrome photographed and processed thirty plus years ago (but stored that whole time), I would expect the Kodachrome color positive to still be in good shape. What if you have a similar circumstance with a digital photo; taking into account that with the age of digital technology you might have to wait 15 to 25 years from now for the same circumstance (assuming that only 5+ megapixel shots are worth using)? Will the pictures have degraded in time on the drive. i.e. will there be a magnetic bleed on the tracks of the traditional hard drive or in the solid state memory that will make the pictures muddy, for example?

Re:Slides made crappy prints

[tibit]

Oh boy. Digital errors are an all-or-nothing affair. If there was a process that introduced errors into dormant magnetic media over time, it would eventually cause uncorrectable sector read errors. That means, pretty much, that you get zeros (or random garbage, depending on behavior of the drive+driver+OS stack) in parts of your image file. Then everything would depend on how you store stuff. Assuming that the errors only affect the data storage area of the files, and not filesystem housekeeping data, everything would depend on image file format. Compressed PNG files are essentially worthless from the point of failure onwards due to format of the zlib-compressed data stream (AFAIK). JPEG files seem to suffer from localized damage, but you may need some massaging before a stock jpeg decoder will correctly cope with such files.

As for the hypothetical error-inducing process: there is none, pretty much. Random reversal of magnetic domains is so slow that you needn't worry about it IIRC at "low" temperatures. If you store a hard drive close to say 5C, purged and sealed in dry air (or nitrogen), it will pretty much last forever. Lowering the temperature helps to slow down the lubricant migration. You may want to warm it up and spin it once a year to break any potential for stiction to build up over time, and to redistribute lubricants on the bearings. Apart from that it's about as permanent of a storage medium as it gets. I have a 10MB full height drive stored like that since 1983, and every year I have it checked out, there are no new errors and everything is peachy. That's more than a quarter of a decade, and my expectation is for the drive to outlast me.

Re:Slides made crappy prints

[dwye]

The problem will not be bit decay, but format changes and "why do you want to save that crap anyway?" as you shift from drive to drive. The data likely will outlast the drive mechanism that would read it.

Re:Slides made crappy prints

[petermgreen]

With most digital storage it's very much an all or nothing affair, either a block is preserved completely, it's unreadable or it's corrupted in a way that throws the compression of. And with compressed formats if you lose a block there is a good chance you won't be able to decipher anything after it anyway (you may still be able to get bits of the image before them).

If you really care about your data keep multiple copies and checksums (the built in checksuming of the drives is NOT sufficiant, use something like md5 or sha1 where the chance of damaged data matching is incrediblly small) and check the copies of the data against the checksums periodically.

Re:Slides made crappy prints

[ckaminski]

call me in 2030 when you can say the same about a 2TB drive purchased today treated the same way. :-)

The data density is far far greater.

Re:Slides made crappy prints

[falconwolf]

How long will a digital picture last in archival quality when stored on a hard drive if it isn't accessed very often.

It shouldn't matter how long the hard drive lasts, with improvements in storage technology what's stored should have it's storage tech upgraded. Much as Moore's Law goes, the tech should be replaced every 2 years or so. The problem there is making sure exact copies are made on the new media, bit for bit. That's where tests come in, which some utilities can do. One is rsync for *nix and OSX.

if you knew you needed a particular stock photo that was on Kodachrome photographed and processed thirty plus years ago (but stored that whole time), I would expect the Kodachrome color positive to still be in good shape.

That would depend on how the film is stored, if in film sleeves in cool storage they should last.

Falcon

Re:Slides made crappy prints

[tibit]

But the underlying mechanisms are the same. As long as stiction won't seize things up, you're good. An unused drive experiences no wear, only lubricant migration and perhaps some creep in the bearings. Both get slowed down by keeping it cool. It's of course imperative that the atmosphere is dry, otherwise condensation may cause things to corrode or stick together.

Make a setup where you can run the drive in a gas-tight enclosure. Purge it for a couple hours with dry nitrogen or somesuch. Then close the outlet valve, bring up the pressure a bit, close the inlet valve, and you're done. A pressure gage will help to make sure there are no leaks. The initial overpressure should be such that when it's cooled down you get down to say 1200 mbar. You don't want a negative pressure at it'll tend to suck moisture in should there be any leaks. Put into a refrigerator.

About the only thing I'd worry about is controller flash losing data over time -- you may want to save the flash contents first, and ensure you have a jig to re-flash it later. Typically it can be done with a custom bed of nails, just like they do at the factory -- so no need to remove the flash from the board. If you do some reading, such a jig can be had for a few hundred USD -- you have to design a custom PCB or two of course, and need to machine a fixture for it. But it's all within an amateurs reach these days.

Re:Slides made crappy prints

[Dirtside]

Why do you continue maintaining that 10 MB drive, may I ask?

Re:Slides made crappy prints

[tibit]

Unabated curiosity. Plus I can shove it in the face of anyone who has fantastic claims about unreliable old technology ;)

Obligatory

[LuxMaker]

I may be showing my age by posting this but here is Paul Simon's "Kodachrome".

No doubt

[ThatsNotPudding]

Westboro Baptist will be down from Topeka tomorrow to protest the store for worshipping graven images.
/Frequently embarrassed native Kansan

Do *you* have a working slide projector?

[wsanders]

The problem with slides is you need a projector or a scanner to show them to people. A projector will fade your slides (even stable Kodachrome) if you show them more than a few times. I can tell which slides in my library I projected a lot, and which stayed in the box.

And eventually you won't be able to buy 35mm slide scanners anymore, although I suppose there will always be services around that will be able to scan them in

I don't think digital media will become inaccessible because DVDs will "fade". It's pretty easy to migrate bits from a doomed media format to another. Rather, it's that the file formats change. I even avoid RAW files: the formats are proprietary, the software has lots of annoying dependencies, are you ready to maintain a box with the last 10 years' version of GTK+ around so the stuff will compile? I keep the highest resolution JPEGs that I can (and don't rewrite them), figuring JPEGs will probably be around the longest amount of time.

Why can't manufacturers make a digital camera that writes files in open TIFF formats?

 

Re:Do *you* have a working slide projector?

[networkBoy]

I save the RAW formats and a low res JPG.
Conveniently this is stored in a container file called TIFF.

TIFF can container most RAW formats, maintaining the RAW data with a fiarly simple (and loss-less) transform.

If you need Polaroid Film...

[Maximum Prophet]

These guys, http://www.the-impossible-project.com/, purchased some old Polaroid manufacturing equipment and are making new film, mostly for artists. Perhaps someone will do the same for Kodachrome.

Paul Simon must be terribly disappointed

[Locke2005]

When I think back
On all the crap I learned in high school
It's a wonder
I can think at all
And though my lack of education
Hasn't hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, Oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away

If you took all the girls I knew
When I was single
And brought them all together for one night
I know they'd never match
my sweet imagination
everything looks WORSE in black and white

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, Oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away

Mama don't take my Kodachrome away
Mama don't take my Kodachrome away
Mama don't take my Kodachrome away

Mama don't take my Kodachrome
Mama don't take my Kodachrome
Mama don't take my Kodachrome away

Mama don't take my Kodachrome
Leave your boy so far from home
Mama don't take my Kodachrome away
Mama don't take my Kodachrome
Mama don't take my Kodachrome away


Looks like Mama DID take his Kodachrome away!

Last lab except for...

[Darth Technoid]

all the governmental spy labs around the world. rest assured that Kodachrome will be developed well into this century.

Wrong!

[Gkeeper80]

Bzzzzztttt, wrong! Those colors ceased to exist after 1980. They were replaced by neon. The only exceptions are in really old kitchen and bathroom fixtures.

Kodak is relieved

[zunipus]

Well, Kodak is relieved in a couple ways:

1) Move out Kodak. Your film is dead, or certainly this form. Digital rulz. Hello Kodak Digital.

2) Kodak no longer have to deal with the severely nasty toxic carcinogenic chemicals required to process Kodachrome. The toxicity has been a thorn in Kodak's side for many decades. They're glad to see the end of it, even if we'll miss those nice bright colors, the greens of summer...

so it's not the last

[jewishbaconzombies]

The last one has been developed .... so get your stuff to Dwayne's - he's got a time machine that will take your film from Dec of this year, and take it back to this week.

GuD RiTe'nG! Hur Hur Dawk!

Re:so it's not the last

[Dogtanian]

No, it's the last roll of Kodachrome to be manufactured that has been processed- not the last roll to have been processed. Smartass.

Re:If this is not the last left unprocessed???

[Anonymous Coward]

Kodachrome can be developed by hand, in a regular darkroom, as a black and white negative film. I've done this with old Kodachrome-II, film for which the color developing chemicals are no longer available. The color dyes in Kodachrome are added in development. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-14_process

So all is not lost :)

AGFA ? Re:So, *will* it be missed?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to use and like Kodak, but always was very happy with results from using (any) AGFA (print) film. I'd be interested in any comparisons you could make between Kodak and AGFA.
Thanks -- Sam

Photoshop, anyone?

[longbot]

Honestly, will anyone who isn't a pro photographer with a $60,000 camera miss this all that much? TFA and all the comments are talking about how it captured color differently than other film technologies... but in the age of image manipulation, why does anyone want to do that up-front anymore? You can just shoot, and then adjust your color as needed or desired after the fact. Film's chemical composition is longer relevant today.

Re:Photoshop, anyone?

[PPH]

Well, I'm an amateur with a $20 camera (an Ikonta 521) and a $100 camera (a Roliflex TLR). Until you get a digital camera that will do 50 or 60 megapixels and better color reproduction, I'll be taking better photos than you.

Kodachrome isn't that big a deal. There are other slide processes out there. Some of their characteristics aren't as good as Kodachrome, some are better, some are just different. Photographers will adjust.

Loupe, not a "lupe"

[sonoronos]

One is a magnifying glass, the other is rapper.

Or just buy ready-made adapters...

[Optic7]

Or just buy ready-made adapters: http://www.criscam.com/mercury_battery_adapters.php

So goes history...

[Neanderthal Ninny]

so that the only Kodachrome will be Paul Simon singing this.

Digital passed 35mm film about 5 years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've shot the same scene with both 35mm kodak film and 8MP DSLR.

When printed at 8x11, the DSLR print had much better detail retention than that from the 35mm film.

The general consensus amongst photography websites like Luminous Landscape (www.luminous-landscape.com) is that 35mm film stopped being useful quite some time ago.

Re:If this is not the last left unprocessed???

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Kodachrome can be processed without using K-14. Older versions of Kodachrome using the K-12, K-11, and older process variants can still be developed, just as a black and white negative, not a color reversal. Kodachrome is essentially a black and white film with three sensitized emulsions; if you don't add the color couplers, you get a black and white image. While as of now, it is essentially amateurs tinkering around, I wouldn't be surprised to see a service offering b&w Kodachrome processing after Dwayne's stops.

Kodachrome vs. E6

[snowwrestler]

Kodachrome was the first popular color slide film. As such it defined how color slides "should" look to a generation of photographers.

Kodachrome has extremely fine grain and does not have the dye clouds that early E6 slide film did, because the color is added during processing. Thus it was the best for big enlargements.

Kodachrome had the best color saturation of slide films for a long time, especially if it was slightly underexposed. National Geographic nature photographers typically shot Kodachrome 64 at 50 ASA for instance.

Kodachrome had deep, rich blacks because it responded to light like a black-and-white film. In addition, because it responded similar to black and white, you could use an approximation of the Zone System with it.

Kodachrome eventually lost all of these advantages as E6 films got better and better. For nature photography, it was firmly dethroned by Fuji Velvia 50.

E6 films are a lot easier to process, thus you could take it a local lab and get it back in a few hours on a rush job.

Companies like Fuji and Kodak improved the dye cloud size and character until it matched or beat Kodachrome 64. Velvia 50 is just as good for enlargements as Kodachrome 64, if not better.

Companies also developed very fine control of color and blackness characteristics of E6 films. You could buy Velvia for deep shadows and heavy saturation--great for nature photography, but terrible for skin tones. Other films optimized for portraits, which meant less heavy saturation and shadows. This also helped photographers get past the "normalcy" of the Kodachrome look.

Galen Rowell wrote quite a bit about his move from Kodachrome to Velvia in one of his books...I think it was "Mountain Light."

Re:Kodachrome vs. E6

[dangitman]

Kodachrome had the best color saturation of slide films for a long time, especially if it was slightly underexposed. National Geographic nature photographers typically shot Kodachrome 64 at 50 ASA for instance.

That would overexpose the film, not underexpose it.

Re:Kodachrome vs. E6

[snowwrestler]

You're right, I should have typed 80 ASA.

Re:If this is not the last left unprocessed???

[notknown86]

Extreme historical importance = Little practical importance. If there is history out there that we don't know about, you can rest assured that even if we did know about it, we wouldn't learn anything from it.

Yesterday don't mean shit. Just let it go.

Rockwell's an expert

[snowwrestler]

He's an electrical engineer who's worked in imaging for most of his adult life. Don't let the jocular writing fool you.

Re:Rockwell's an expert

[dangitman]

So why is his article so retarded? Go and read the article that was cited. It lacks basic logic and scientific method. It lacks basic common sense.

He compares a photo taken with a 4x5" view camera to one shot with a DX-format digital camera. This makes no sense, unless he is trying to deliberately mislead. Whether he's an "expert" or not, that is one shoddy article.

Re:Rockwell's an expert

[snowwrestler]

I've read that article and its revisions many times. It's always struck me as very reasonable, with quotes like:

Neither is better on an absolute basis. The choice depends on your application. Once you know your application the debate goes away. The debate only exists when people presume erroneously that someone else's needs mirror their own.

So why the debate? I suspect the debate is among amateurs who've really only shot 35mm since it's been the only popular amateur film format for the past 25 years. Pros never say "film," they say a format like "120," "4x5," "6x17," "8x20" or "35" since "film" could mean so many things. Amateurs say "film" since they only use one format and presume 35mm. Therein lies the potential for debate when people don't first define their terminology. Today's digital SLRs replace 35mm, no big deal. Most people will get far better prints from a 6MP DSLR like the D70 than they will paying someone else to print their 35mm film.

The point of the article is to educate people about film photography vs. digital photography. It's not a 35mm format shootout. One of his constantly-recurring themes is that there is more to photography than 35mm. A 4x5 view camera that shoots film will cost less than a top-end DSLR and will capture much higher resolution. On the other hand, you can only use it for certain types of pictures. He addresses these and other tradeoffs. Be sure to read the thing from top to bottom--don't just skip to the pictures and read the captions.

Re:Rockwell's an expert

[dangitman]

I've read that article and its revisions many times. It's always struck me as very reasonable,

Then I question your ability to judge "expert" knowledge, or even to have a basic understanding of the issues.

The point of the article is to educate people about film photography vs. digital photography.

But it does exactly the opposite. It misleads people about film vs. digital by comparing completely different cameras.

A 4x5 view camera that shoots film will cost less than a top-end DSLR and will capture much higher resolution.

But the article is titled and positioned as if it's a comparison of film to digital, not a 4x5 film camera to a DX-format digital.

A 4x5 camera with a digital back will also shoot much higher resolution than a DX digital camera. The point is also invalid, because realistically, a top-end DSLR actually costs less than a 4x5 camera with lenses and the cost of film and processing.

He addresses these and other tradeoffs. Be sure to read the thing from top to bottom--don't just skip to the pictures and read the captions.

I have, and it's complete bunk. He's addressing this to amateurs, and it is very misleading. An amateur isn't going to understand from that article exactly what it's like working with a 4x5 camera. He deliberately muddies the waters and cherry-picks in order to make his claim that film is superior. And WTF? Do you really think an amateur today is going to go out and buy a 4x5 camera instead of a digital SLR? It makes no sense unless you are intending to shoot very specific scenes, and have the budget to do it.

If it were an "expert" article he would do actual technical tests of resolving power.

Re:Rockwell's an expert

[falconwolf]

A 4x5 camera with a digital back will also shoot much higher resolution than a DX digital camera. The point is also invalid, because realistically, a top-end DSLR actually costs less than a 4x5 camera with lenses and the cost of film and processing.

This is only valid if you shoot hundreds if not thousands of photos. Fact is is the major difference in cost between digital and film medium format cameras is the cost of the backs. And film backs are a lot cheaper than the thousands of dollars a digital back costs. Take for instance a Hasselblad H2F. B&H Photo and Video lists the price at $7000. A film back for it costs $400 and RVP 120mm Fujichrome Velvia film is $6. A Adapter Plate Kit for CF/CF-MS Digital Backs cost $900. That's more than twice as much for digital, and it is a dedicated interface for the Hasselblad CF Digital Back System not a digital back itself, than the film back. You can shoot a lot of film with just the difference in price.

Or take a DSRL instead of a medium camera with digital back. Canon's highest res DSRL is the EOS 1Ds Mark III which costs the same as the Hasselblad. Now which do you think is a better camera (rhetorical question, it depends on the use)? Or there's the Hasselblad H2F at $2700. And of course there are a number of cameras other than Hasselblad, such as Mamiya and Pentax.

Falcon

Re:Rockwell's an expert

[dangitman]

This is only valid if you shoot hundreds if not thousands of photos.

And recommending a 4x5 camera over a 35mm form-factor DSLR is only valid if you only shoot pictures of things that don't move, and you don't mind lugging around heavy equipment everywhere, and you specialize in architecture or landscapes.

It's just such a stupid thing to suggest, especially given Ken Rockwell's audience. Anyone who has a need for a 4x5 camera is not going to be visiting his website for advice.

Rockwell just glosses over all this, in order to make a misleading argument. Do you know how you operate a 4x5 camera? You set it up, you put a black cloth over your head, make adjustments to tilt and shift geometry, focus the image using a magnifying loupe on a ground glass, take measurements with a light meter, insert film holder, remove the dark slide, make an exposure, replace the dark slide. For one shot. You might even make Polaroid test shots first, if they still made Polaroid film.

Whatever your opinions of film versus digital, I think anyone with a brain and an understanding of the subject can agree that Rockwell's article is highly disingenuous and misleading. He's comparing two extremely different use cases and presenting them as equivalent choices. But that's not where the retardation ends. He also can't write very well, he doesn't explain topics clearly, he just rambles on irrelevant tangents, he can't stick to one idea. I think his audience probably come out more confused and less informed after they read these stupid articles.

Re:Rockwell's an expert

[aliquis]

He mentions what was used, prices and results.

You know what film was used. Whatever the results and conclusions mean anything for you or are worthless for your purpose is up to you to decide.

Film vs digital may be somewhat misleading though since maybe then one would had wanted to see the possibilities of each medium and not so completely different versions but rather regular film sized film/sensor in both cases.

Re:Rockwell's an expert

[snowwrestler]

A lot of people do shoot pictures of things that don't move. I do know how to operate a view camera, and you'll doubtlessly be shocked to learn that I first tried it out as a rank amateur (and long before KenRockwell.com hit the Webs).

It sounds like you're the type of person he's talking about in the quote I put in my post. You seem very hung up on your own conception of what constitutes photography, and you're upset when someone talks about it in a different way.

As I said before, the point of the article is to encourage people to think of serious photography more broadly than just DSLRs. That message doesn't seem to resonate with you, but there's no reason to get angry about it. I don't use a view camera these days; I use a DSLR mostly, or a waterproof point and shoot. But I recognize their limitations in the greater scope of photography--I know I'm trading off lower image quality for greater convenience. And if you read other articles on the site, you'll see that Ken does too. The post that first mentioned him linked to a humorous article about it:

http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d200/d200-vs-4x5.htm

Re:Rockwell's an expert

[dangitman]

It sounds like you're the type of person he's talking about in the quote I put in my post. You seem very hung up on your own conception of what constitutes photography, and you're upset when someone talks about it in a different way.

how the fuck would you get that out of my posts? the opposite is the truth.

As I said before, the point of the article is to encourage people to think of serious photography more broadly than just DSLRs.

That's the exact opposite of what the article is trying to do, which is to mislead people into following Rockwell's particular conception of photography, and not think intelligently.

As I said before, the point of the article is to encourage people to think of serious photography more broadly than just DSLRs. That message doesn't seem to resonate with you,

But that's not what the message of his article is! Why would I think photography is just about DSLRs, when I own and use cameras of many different formats, including 4x5, medium format, digital, etc, and have done for decades? That doesn't make any sense.

That message doesn't seem to resonate with you, but there's no reason to get angry about it.

Firstly, I'm not angry. But I do not like people writing misleading things, especially when their audience is impressionable and doesn't know better. He has no excuse for misleading writing.

Bottom line: Ken Rockwell is a hack writer, who should be ashamed of his website, and the damage that he's done to photographic education. He preys on ignorance to drive page views.

Cross process != bleach bypass.

[adam]

Thanks for your post — posts like this are why I try to make time to read /. when I have a free moment.

I want to point out that the statement you made at the end of your post is not technically correct (afaik). Three Kings and Blackhawk Down both did a bleach bypass develop, which is not technically a cross process but rather involves either skipping the bleach part of the process, or shortening it by more than half (thereby leaving some silver halide on the film). There is also a similar silver retention process called ENR, designed at Technicolor for Vittorio Storaro, and yields similar results (the blacks are "blacker" etc) with more predictability. Saving Private Ryan was processed by ENR.

I am a digital filmmaker, so anything I have written above may possibly be technically incorrect, but I'm 90% confident I got it right. I do shoot a fair amount of Velvia in my rangefinder/SLRs, however, and absolutely love color reversal film. I am headed to Africa (to shoot a documentary) in a few months, and am pondering my access to E6 labs while I am there (read: probably not likely) and considering whether I should switch over to a negative film (fuji pro 160C I have had good results with), or stick with Velvia 50/100 and attempt to get a lab there to C41 process all of it for me. I could wait until my return to the states to develop it, but my hope is to develop and print my snaps while there and then mail the prints to friends and family as surprise one-of-a-kind postcards.

Re:Cross process != bleach bypass.

[theshowmecanuck]

Yeah, I guess it is whether you consider a modified bleach process as cross processing. Some do, some don't. I can definitely see why someone would consider it something else altogether. As for your trip to Africa, I've found that often Lonely Planet guides/books have quite useful information on things even down to where you can get various types of film processing; even in third world countries. You might want to pick up a guide at your local travel/book store for whatever country(s) it is you're going. Unless maybe you are going to be filming the war in Congo or some other place where the modern world will be .... errrr.... less modern. Of course depending what you find out when you get your feet on the ground, it might be better to just hold on to the film until you get home. :) From my experience, it is also a good idea that if you do elect to get someone to process film while you are there, to give them only a roll or two on a couple of occasions before giving them all your stuff.

Update: or get direct replacement batteries...

[Optic7]

Real 1.35v replacements for the old mercury batteries: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/96457-REG/Wein_W9901201_MRB625_Cell_1_35v_Zinc_Air.html

36 slides

[falconwolf]

It figures he would make them into slides.

Kodachrome is slide film. Seeing TFA title I was concerned, I thought I might have unused Kodachrome film myself. But the one roll of slide film from Kodak I have is Elite Chrome. Guess I'll be using Fuji film, Sensia perhaps, for my slides from now on.

Falcon

alternative and cross processing film

[falconwolf]

I have to admit that when I did cross processed photography it was mostly as an experiment/learning experience.

So far all I've done is pushing or pulling film however I want to try other alternative methods of developing film. I'd like to go through Alternative Photography to see what they have. I heard one where orange juice was used. Ah, here's one using lemon juice. I like how the photo turned out.

I wonder how much longer film will be available. Kodak stopped making film based cameras, now this. Though TFA says Kodak stopped making Kodachrome they still make Elite, er, Ektachrome.

Falcon

Re:alternative and cross processing film

[theshowmecanuck]

If you are working with black and white, and want to try alternate chemistry and aren't afraid of chemistry, get Ansel Adam's book "The Negative". It is part of his three book series on his method of photography ("The Camera", "The Negative", and "The Print"... all of which are worth their weight in gold). In the last part of the book he goes through different chemical formulations for creating your own developers based on what you are trying to do. Also if you are working with black and white, look at his 10 stop film latitude methods and how he played with contrast. i.e. shoot for the shadow and modify the processing time to either increase or decrease the contrast on the negative itself. You can also try 'accelerator' additives for developing. Screwing around with film processing and print making is very cool IMO, and what makes/keeps film print making as a real art form that shouldn't be lost. For B&W printing, see if you can find 'Oriental' brand 'Seagull' fibre bases paper. If you do get some, at the very end give it a bath in very dilute (archival dilution) of selenium toner. The blacks on the print will turn so black it is astounding and very cool. You won't regret it.

Re:alternative and cross processing film

[falconwolf]

If you are working with black and white, and want to try alternate chemistry and aren't afraid of chemistry, get Ansel Adam's book "The Negative".

Though I have some colour C41 for about 10 years I've been using mostly E6 colour slide film. I love chemistry so that's not a problem. As for the book, I'll check it out on Amazon, ah they have 43 book listed from or about him. Amazon also has The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes

For B&W printing, see if you can find 'Oriental' brand 'Seagull' fibre bases paper.

I don't know if they have that paper but there's a Dick Blick art supply store near me that has a bunch of art paper. I'm not sure if they have photography paper or not but for computer printing they have some good paper, and eventually I want to get into that. For now I'll shoot film then scan prints.

Falcon

Re:alternative and cross processing film

[theshowmecanuck]

With black and white, there is so much you can do with the print making. And given that the latitude of a bw print is so much greater than with digital, it would be a good thing to try out. But I can't fault you with sticking with digital. Print making is pretty involved and messy, requiring significant investment in tools, time, and money. :) Cheers.

Re:alternative and cross processing film

[theshowmecanuck]

Oh by the way, pushing and pulling colour film is like a dice game. The colour curves for colour film are separate. That is, each of the RGB layers has a different response curve (with respect to exposure time), that overlap for a short range that allows one to be able to take a picture. So when you push or pull they don't all 'move' together. That is why you can see hard shifts into the red (on the finished product with C41) for example when you push film from say 800 to 3600 or 6400 iso. That is one area where digital excels over film.

Re:alternative and cross processing film

[falconwolf]

given that the latitude of a bw print is so much greater than with digital, it would be a good thing to try out.

I started out, in a high school photography class, with B&W. While I like it I prefer shooting in colour, colour film can always be printed in B&W but not the other way. That is not without hand painting B&W photos, which I also would like to do.

But I can't fault you with sticking with digital.

I don't shoot digitally. I don't even have a cheap digicam never mind a DSLR. All I have right now is a 35mm film camera. For my next camera I want to get a medium format camera, probably a used 645, with a film back. Nat Cam or National Camera Exchange, which is a local chain, buys and sells used equipment. Currently they're listing a Mamiya 645 Pro body for $165, a back for $75, and lenses as low as $95. Used Hasselblads are twice that, which is still a good buy. I'll also want to look and see if I can get a camera mount for it for my telescope as well, I've got the mount for my 35mm. But I haven't used it yet, I need to find a good place for astrophotography. Now for that I may very well shoot B&W.

Print making is pretty involved and messy, requiring significant investment in tools, time, and money. :)

Yea it can be, but it's fun too. While I eventually want to set up my own darkroom, a local group has darkrooms members can use. I don't know about the chemicals but I'll probably have to buy my own paper. I'm hoping I can start a photography business as well, then if I make money at it I will try to set up a darkroom of my own. I'll also want to buy a digital back as well as a DSLR. It may be wishful thinking but I hope I can make enough money to support a photography hobby. Then again new businesses have better changes of success when the economy is down, they just need to offer lower prices or unique products and services than established businesses. Or be more aggressive in their marketing.

Falcon

Mama don't take my Kodachrome

[falconwolf]

Great song and movie.

*sigh* At least I still have my Nikon camera.

Canon camera here. I'd like to get a full-frame DSRL I can use the lenses I have now on, and not have the photos cropped. Either the EOS 1Ds Mark III or EOS 5D Mark II.

Actually I'd like to be able to shoot digital and film at the same tyme.

Falcon

storage

[falconwolf]

Why go through all that work when in 10 years nothing will be able to read it. Paper tapes are used anymore. How many computers come with floppies today? Every couple of years archives should be transferred to new tech. Of course keep the old stuff for two or three generations, as a fail-safe measure. Going through some housekeeping a few days ago I came across some old 100 and 250 MB Zip disks as well as floppies. I've still got an old NT4 PC so I'll keep emergency disks for it, but I'll make sure I transferred what I have on Zip disks to my external HDDs, 3 of which I have.

Falcon

Re:storage

[tibit]

The problem with removable media drives like ZIP drives or tape drives is that they often have rubber/polymer coated parts (belts or capstans) that disintegrate over time and there's little that you can do about it. They require regular servicing to keep them operating -- you have to open them once per decade or two. Otherwise they too are forever-lasting devices. Sometimes you can fashion an upgrade part from a better material.

As for "nothing will be able to read it": I don't think we're anywhere near that for PIDE drives -- the PIDE/SATA-to-USB adapters are plenty and cheap, and USB has been available for well over a decade now.

  The drive I referred to had the ST-506 interface, and the easiest way to read it is with a two chip dongle that has ST-506 on one end, and serial-via-USB on another. If I had more time, I'd do a full-blown storage class device implementation, but all I care is to be able to dump the whole drive's contents.

Re:storage

[falconwolf]

I think you missed the whole point of my post, if you want to keep a data archive for years, you should be migrating the data from old storage technology to newer tech. Don't rely on 20, heck 10, year old tech.

Falcon

Re:storage

[tibit]

My point was that you don't have to do that, precisely ;)

Re:storage

[falconwolf]

My point was that you don't have to do that, precisely ;)

But you do, no matter what technology is used it will eventually fail. Even human memory fails.

Hell I know that, my memory is terrible due to an injury I survived. Without my paper based planner and the calendar built into my cellphone I'd miss doctor and rehab appointments. So I don't fail to enter appointments when I make them I will enter them into the planner as well as the calendar, both of which I always have with me. Just yesterday I did that, at my doctor's office I had a hearing test and the tech didn't like the results so she said I needed to see a hearing doctor. As I made the appointment at the desk I wrote it in the planner then entered it into the calendar as well. When I did I saw I already had an appointment with a therapist at the same tyme, so I called him then and there to let him know I had to reschedule our appointment, I thought seeing the doc was more important and the next available tyme for the doc was a few days later.

With hardware and physical media, they fail more frequently than human memory does. I've had to replace the harddisk in 2 new PCs in the first year as well as the RAM in one. I've had floppies, Zips, CDs, and DVDs fail on me too. Don't tell me people can get by keeping old technology.

Falcon

Re:storage

[tibit]

I guess I was misunderstood. I only claimed that if all you're after is archival storage with rare need for access, you may as well keep the original hardware. Perhaps after running it for a bit to shake through infant mortality. I still claim that there should be no problems storing hard drives, in controlled conditions, for many decades, and having them work just fine when periodically powered up. I do agree with you that technology will eventually fail. Just that if you do it right, the life expectancy of storage technology even from two decades ago can easily surpass that of us and our children.

Re:storage

[falconwolf]

I still claim that there should be no problems storing hard drives, in controlled conditions, for many decades, and having them work just fine when periodically powered up.

The hard drives in 2 brand new PCs I bought failed in the first year I had them, one after only 6 months. Another HDD, a 750 GB drive with more than 500 GB on it, was reformatted when I took the PC in for service. Though I left written instructions not touch the drive, the technician did anyway. I should have removed the drive before taking it in, it was the second drive in the PC and was used as the home directory so I could have gotten away with taking it out. I still haven't gotten around to recovering the data, by first replacing the drive, cloning it, then unformatting the clone. Of course if I had had backups them it would have been alright, but external drive big enough were too expensive for me and it would have taken almost 100 double density DVDs.

Of course, if old tech is in cold storage then there's little risk of reformatting.

Falcon

This guy is making his own homebrew Kodachrome

[Traf-O-Data-Hater]

This article on Hackaday late last year is about a project to make Homebrew Kodachrome: http://hackaday.com/2009/12/08/homebrew-kodachrome/

film vs digital

[falconwolf]

Film has a lot of data recorded in it that can be very expansively blown up if desired;...
Digital has a hard limit based on the hardware of the camera.

Using upres software like Genuine Fractals even a 5MP photo can be printed out on large paper. And with today's DSRL cameras breaking 20MP poster sized prints are possible.

On top of that you have format loss if you use a lossy format to store the image in

So, store in RAW and tiff. RAW may not be around more than a few years but tiff should be around longer.

you still can't get even a top-grade professional camera that matches Film at the DPI level. It's still a few years away.

Many pro photographers will argue that with you.

Falcon

Film has many reasons to recommend

[Duncan J Murray]

That's simply not true - I'd like to see your references. Most comparisons between film and digital have compared digital versus scanned film rather than digital prints versus optical prints. The actual resolution of film is difficult to quantify as it needs specialist equipment (I'm not talking about a scanner) - for example viewing film through a microscope will retrieve far more information than any scanner costing less than $5000.

When you refer to a '60 megapixel' digital image - you must also remember that there is a certain amount of redundancy in the image, due to the bayer interpolation. Those pixels are not pixel-perfect.

But that only addresses resolution - probably one of the least important aspects of visual media. What is also important is tonality, colour accuracy, dynamic range and most importantly, fidelity (i.e. free from artefacts).

But film still wins outside of what is measurable - where you exceed the resolution and dynamic range. All you get in digital is a metaphorical brick wall of digital noise, artefacts from bayer interpolation/sharpening/noise reduction, whereas on film you get (?artistic) soft grainy organic noise. The same applies to dynamic range - in digital you get harsh clipping of colour as you exceed the range of each of the R, G and B sensors, creating a stripy rainbow from red/orange/yellow to white in every sunset photo you ever take, with film you get a smooth gradation to white.

To prove my last point - have you ever seen anyone take digital photos at an ISO of 3200 to get 'the look'. Yet I'm sure you've seen plenty of B&W film images shot at 3200 for effect, and that's because when you exceed the limits of film (easy to do with ISO3200), what lies beneath is organic and beautiful in its own right.

There are still very strong reasons to carry on shooting film, particularly if you know how to get the best out of it. You can get a small second-hand camera (such as a Pentax MX or Nikon FE), weighing half the weight of your Canon 5d mkII, with excellent glass, lets say the 50/1.4 SMC-A or 50/1.4 nikkor, use some fuji superia 400, or if you're feeling special, some provia 400 and send your photos to NCPS in california and get them to do processing and the budget scan, and if there's anything really amazing in that roll, you can get a stunning 30x20 optical print of it. Once you've done that, try telling me with any confidence that you've seen better digital prints :)

Duncan.

Re:Film has many reasons to recommend

[dangitman]

But film still wins outside of what is measurable - where you exceed the resolution and dynamic range. All you get in digital is a metaphorical brick wall of digital noise, artefacts from bayer interpolation/sharpening/noise reduction, whereas on film you get (?artistic) soft grainy organic noise.

This is just nonsense. Current digital cameras exceed film in resolution and dynamic range. You have already reached "the wall" of film, while digital is still reproducing nuances.

The same applies to dynamic range - in digital you get harsh clipping of colour as you exceed the range of each of the R, G and B sensors, creating a stripy rainbow from red/orange/yellow to white in every sunset photo you ever take, with film you get a smooth gradation to white.

If you've already exceeded film's dynamic range, you don't get "a smooth gradation to white" because you've already gone past white, and have blown out all the highlights. But because digital has greater dynamic range, you still have gradations when you have gone well past film's limits.

Re:Film has many reasons to recommend

[Duncan J Murray]

Using arguments such as 'this is nonsense' doesn't give you much backing here.

Your analysis of exceeding the dynamic range of digital and film suggests you don't really understand. For starters, it isn't one channel. A typical sunset pic will blow all three channels sequentially, be it film or digital. The difference is that when digital reaches 255 in the red channel,it doesn't go anyl further. You'll notice a sudden red to orange shift in hue as the channels lose their respective ratios. In film, the characteristic curve has a shoulder, which tails back the clipping of it's channels, allowing for a smooth transition to white. Yes, inaccurate colour changes occur near the limits of the film, but they will look more natural.

Your argument hinges on digital being technically superior, so that how the media behaves beyond its limits is not of any importance. Its a shame you didn't provide references. I'm afraid I cannot provide any here as it's too much of a faff from my phone, but if you'd like to look up mauro franic on photo.net, he has an excellent comparison of dynamic range, and some articles on resolution.

I'll leave you with this - fuji velvia has 120lp/mm resolution, as measured by fuji as a specification of the medium - how does that translate to pixel pairs per mm?

Re:Film has many reasons to recommend

[dangitman]

Using arguments such as 'this is nonsense' doesn't give you much backing here.

Where is "here," exactly?

A typical sunset pic will blow all three channels sequentially, be it film or digital. The difference is that when digital reaches 255 in the red channel,it doesn't go anyl further.

And when film reaches the limits of its dynamic range, it doesn't go any further, either.

In film, the characteristic curve has a shoulder, which tails back the clipping of it's channels, allowing for a smooth transition to white.

Yes, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about what happens when you go beyond that (very limited) shoulder.

Its a shame you didn't provide references.

OK then, I'll help you out. Try this for reference. An old digital camera, the Canon 1D Mk II shows over 10 stops of dynamic range, while color negative film has around 7 stops, and color slide film has around 5 stops.

What this means, is that your film is already at least 3 stops overexposed while the digital camera is still recording tonal detail. By "overexposed" here, we are talking about well past your "shoulder" which only applies to a minute range of values. The same applies to underexposure.

Your argument hinges on digital being technically superior, so that how the media behaves beyond its limits is not of any importance.

That doesn't make any sense. We were talking about what the limits are. Film reaches its limit well before digital fails.

Re:Film has many reasons to recommend

[Duncan J Murray]

If you go back to my original posting, you'll see that I state right off that many comparisons compare digital with scanned film - the one you have linked is a good example. At most you can say that film scanned with a Polaroid Sprintscan 4 has worse dynamic range than digital. But that is not what we're discussing here.

Clarkvision's site has been around for a while, so I am well aware of his tests. I think some of them have some important flaws. One of his most linked graphs compares resolution with ISO of both film and digital, unfortunately he measures resolution in MP, rather than tested resolution, therefore concluding that a 20MP camera at 3200 has as much resolution as the same sensor at 100. I'm not sure if this has been updated. I also cannot remember how the film was scanned.

Here is a link comparing film scanned with a half-decent scanner (Nikon Coolscan), though still not professional grade (i.e. not a Heidelberg Tango drum scanner) with digital:

http://photo.net/film-and-processing-forum/00Rb8S

You keep saying that we are discussing the technical limits of the media here, but if you are comparing media, you need to take all aspects of it into consideration, and I think how a medium performs beyond its limits is important aswell.

Re:Film has many reasons to recommend

[dangitman]

but if you are comparing media, you need to take all aspects of it into consideration, and I think how a medium performs beyond its limits is important aswell.

What a meaningless statement! If a medium has gone past its limits, by definition, it can't "perform" anymore, otherwise it would be within its limits.

Re:Film has many reasons to recommend

[Duncan J Murray]

It depends whether you are talking about media designed to represent art or information. Of course, if you were using film to make copies of documents, then it's behaviour beyond it's resolution limit is of no interest, as that is information lost.

However, lets take a photograph taken on a 35mm format camera, at, say ISO 1600, enlarged to 20"x20" - most photographs would say that this is technically beyond what film or digital at this size can do. But here is such a photograph by Testino, which was shown at this size at the National Portrait Gallery:

http://www.pbase.com/omoses/image/103309345

You can see from even this small image the amount of grain in the photograph - imagine how much grain the fullsize print had. However, this print was one of the most impressive in a room full of portraits by Testino, Rankin, etc..

When you take photographs at the limit of the media's capability, and then enlarge it to large sizes, the artefacts become crystal clear, which is a problem if they are ugly.

With digital expect to see: moire (an interference pattern created by the precise pattern of the sensor), bayer artefacts (similar to moire, except in two dimensions - caused by the algorithm used to interpolate brightness values from the RGB sensors), noise reduction artefacts (seen as a smoothing of areas with little detail - the problem occurs with natural subjects, where the decision to smooth is not intelligent, and you lose information in order to lower the 'noise' at high ISOs), sharpening artefacts (to counteract the softening of noise reduction - except it won't know the size you are enlarging to, so it is often unhelpful), noise (of a multi-colour sort, seen by most people as undesirable). I won't go on, but I left out chromatic aberrations and blooming. Admittedly, with better sensors, these are improving.

Here is an example I have taken where grain is an integral part of the image. Apart from the grain, this image suffers from no other artefacts that I can see:

http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=11324330

Canon Canoscan 4400F?

[falconwolf]

Was a stupid idea to buy it in the first place because it took bloody ages and results are poor

In the same general price range Epson Perfection V500 is good. I've got hundreds if not thousands of exposures on film I've been scanning. So far all I've scanned is negatives, I haven't scanned positives or slides yet so I don't know how those will come out. The one problem I have with the V500 is the errors saying image size or area selected is too large for the resolution and to reduce the res or reduce the size. If I had the money I'd upgrade to the V700. A dedicated film scanner may be better but except for the drum scanners costing thousands of dollars most of them only scan 35mm and I want to scan 4x6 medium format film as well.

Also I think someone said that it was better to scan at a lower resolution for some reason, is that so?

That depends on how big the prints are, if you print, and how much is cropped. Even printing at 300 dpi a 2400 ppi scanner will print 8" photos. On the other hand if you want bigger prints or will be doing a lot of editing scanning at higher resolutions is better. Check out Photo.net's film scanning forum.

Falcon