A certain amount of sentiment being expressed this morning (e.g. here and here) about the demise of Kodachrome.
My own collection of Pentaxes and their lenses started in 1968 and now fills several flightcases. I have been at it that long and I have to say I shan’t miss Kodachrome at all.
Kodachrome was awful. Quite apart from its being just about Kodak’s finest film-sales racket (their paid-process arrangement was challenged by the US government and banned there, but not elsewhere), it was notoriously inaccurate, having (allegedly) been designed, like much of Kodak’s stuff, to exploit the holiday-snap market. All the colours were oversaturated, the purpose of which being to make the sky look bluer, the grass greener and one’s tan somewhat tannier.
High Speed Ektachrome, at 400ASA, easy to process and, if properly exposed, far less mendacious, was always in my view a better bet for my sort of work (I briefly experimented with GAF/Ansco 500, but it was already being discontinued before I made much of it).
One cannot help but wonder how Kodak will survive the collapse of their self-made market. To be quite honest, having, during a lifetime of being involved one way or another with photography, rather endured than enjoyed their commercial provisions, I’m not at all sure that I’d miss them either.
do you mind if I ask have you gone digital in any way with your camera setup?
I do own a digital camera. It’s a Fuji. I’m very happy with it; it cost little, survived a fall from a car into a car park, takes good pictures and doesn’t mess me about (it is of course so old that it is about the same size and weight as a Trip-35, of which I own several; they are the best POV still cameras for the money, but I did eventually buy a slim, elegant, Leica-lensed Ricoh GR-1 for hillwalking).
What I really want is a digital camera body which can be made to accept my collection of M42 lenses. Of course most of the serious ones can (I already have an adaptor for Nikon). Unfortunately, and completely unnecessaily, all ‘SLR’ type digital bodies have for reasons of styling alone a huge, beetling but sometimes empty mock-prism box on top, which often overhangs the lens mount by as much as an inch and completely prevents the attachment of macro equipment, mirror-lenses, and all the other jolly stuff that anyone who knows an optical machinist can have made up.
If you happen to know of a digital body which can adapt to M42 and has a *flat* front I’d be very grateful if you’d let me know. Not that I could afford one at the moment, mind, but all the same…
Well it was better than Fuji. And what the eff were you using 400 film for? I only used it for unusual occasions.
The first photos of my life that mattered, on my “gap year” (it wasn’t called that then ‘coz everybody who was going up thought they ought to do one) were taken out of the windows of an “Alia” ( = Royal Jordanian Airlines) Caravelle, in July 1969, in various places in the stratosphere between England and Beirut. I still have the collection. I think the film was Kodachrome 25 ASA.
I spent all my “foreign exchange allowance” before leaving, on said film, and I didn’t regret it one bit. Only bummer was the Israelis wouldn’t let me in, as I had a Lebanese visa on my passport, obtained in London. (it was 1969, so make allowances.)
However, one did get to Damascus after a 4-hour grilling, and Petra and Jerash etc.
A Jordanian beer in the departure-lounge at Amman airport did cost FIVE SHILLINGS, but it __was__ nicely cold.
I would like to know, for my old age, where I will be able to buy (any) 35mm film for my group of Olympus Half-Frame SLRs.
At the last census I did have at least three, a PEN-FT, another PEN-FT not quite so reliable, and a PEN-F, and about 6 lenses (various) for same.
There is also an Olympus adaptor-set for my Praktica-thread lenses and also Tamron ones.
It would be nice to know that my sons could use these camerae for most of this century.
As a technical photographer most of my occasions have been unusual, in that sense, though I once got a nice-looking but remarkably dim girl a job as a model using Ansco 500 pushed to 1000, in the style of the once boring but now apparently controversial David Hamilton.
Fuji do (or used to do; I’ve been retired for some years) a 16mm stock in 500ASA which was very suitable for high-speed stuff, and seemed to be able to resist the temptation to break up at 1000fps.
Fond as I always was of the shriek of DC motors which always preceded the bang, I have to say that the new high-speed video systems we invested in shortly before I stood down produced an almost instant result of rather better quality than 1-Bs or even 1-PLs, did so in an impressive silence, and had the charming property of post-event synchronisation, in which the camera runs continuously, always recording the last two thousand milliseconds, or whatever, to be stopped neatly by one’s button only after, as OAC put it, “all the debris have quit falling”.
The only problem with them, apart from the difficulty of reading an image from a laptop screen in broad daylight (eventual solution: stand the laptop on a bar-stool, and place a view-camera photographer’s black cloth over the entire assembly and oneself, much to the amusement of visiting foreign defence fellows), was the bottom line: £90K per camera head, and you get to supply all the computers.
DD: at the moment there doesn’t seem to be a problem with the supply of 35mm film stock, because feature films and TV adverts are still shot on it.
Until digital imaging gets so good that it can record image data at the same rate, 35mm will doubtless continue to be available.
Even when it is replaced in this role it will probably still be made for people like yourself, albeit perhaps rather more expensively.
Pity those who have collected 9.5mm centre-sprocket Minoxes; that’s what I do.
Minoxes? Oh you are __such__ a saddo! So abstruse!
(But it is a lovely machine – I did own one while a student, and even shot stuff on it. But it was a bit of a pain as I couldn’t dev the film myself and not many shops in the Town know what to do with it, so I sold it at a loss.)
But I’m obliged to you to know that I may still be able to get stock for those PENs for a bit. (I’m a FP4 man really, in my old age, I decided.)
All I’m worried about is the loss, out of the bottom of the bucket of race-memory, of the knowledge of why (scientifically) and how (practically) AgBr-based film did what it did.
Already, our 5-yr-old son sees a photo being shot on a digital machine, and screeches “I wanna see it, daddy, I wanna see!”
It was never like that with us.
Forty (!) years ago in a copystand at Augsburg college, in Minneapolis, Fuji film was put up with before Kodak, in the dearth of GAF stuff because of some budget problem….
And, was there not a short-lived but wonderful BASF product, then, of some sort?
Agfachrome 50L ? (very good stuff.)
Hmm, might be…I shall write to a guy called Larry and ask him, he was a good friend and the guy I worked for in the AV department….
My main problem is getting 5X4 sheet film for my speedgraphic. Damn GREAT camera, but presently useless.
Von Brandenburg-Preußen.
It would be nice, OM, to hear from you in due course, when it will be convenient.
73