Foto Friday – Give me those nice, bright colors…

Since we were on the road on Friday, we know this is a little late!  Better late than never, right?

Eastman Kodak, my old employer, just announced that they are discontinuing the production of one of their flagship products Kodachrome. Produced for the last 74 years, it was the first commercially successful color film that amateurs and professionals alike could use and was known for it fabulous, bright color and accuracy. Most of the world’s most stunning pictures were captured on Kodachrome and continued to be so even with the advent of Kodak’s Ektachrome film and Fuji’s Velvia films. Sadly though, Kodakchrome has been losing market share, along with most other film, and now represents a fraction of 1% of Kodak film sales. The process to manufacture and process it is very complex (there is only one lab in the US that still processes it), and so it’s gone.

Here’s a link to a great set of images that capture the look of Kodachrome – this is from NPR – http://www.npr.org/multimedia/2009/06/kodachrome/
You can see the original article here. (oops – they removed the article. Sorry -Stan)

The film is so famous Paul Simon immortalized it in a song:

What I remember best are boxes or trays of old slides – often on Kodachrome. The stability of the film allows it to preserve those memories from long ago. Jenn’s dad has great pictures (and Kodachrome movies) of them at Disneyworld when it opened and of when Jenn was a child. And that’s the legacy this once great film brings to digiscrappers – preserving those memories to scrap.

Do you have any old boxes of slides laying around? Are they Kodachrome? What are you going to do with them?

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