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Last Roll of Kodachrome Processed

Posted by kdawson on from the gimme-the-greens-of-summer dept.

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.

9 of 359 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Figures by Entropius · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What else are you going to make slide film into?

  2. Rolls of Kodachrome by ceswiedler · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:Figures by HockeyPuck · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Figures by MightyYar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    --
    W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
  5. Re:Figures by Serious+Callers+Only · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

  6. Re:Figures by sleeping143 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    1. Goat detection at night

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

  7. Re:Figures by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re:So, *will* it be missed? by GoatEnigma · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  9. Re:So, *will* it be missed? by epp_b · · Score: 4, Insightful

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