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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.
What else are you going to make slide film into?
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.
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.
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).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Two things:
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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?
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""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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
1. Goat detection at night
Actually, a negative film's higher exposure latitude would make it a much better choice for this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Using Ken Rockwell as a reference for photography is like using Fox as a reference for news.
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.
testing out my trending skills