Kodachrome to Be Discontinued

This news is bound make us (or at least some of us who recently converted to digital and were too young to live through the glory of the film era) sad. Kodak will discontinue Kodachrome. We will miss the never-too-fast 64 ISO speed.

Kodachrome, manufactured by Kodak, was the world's first successful color film. Introduced in 1935, by the 1950s and 1960s it was the standard film stock for color still-photography. In recent decades, however, Kodachrome's popularity decreased significantly because of the special processing needed to develop it. Unlike virtually every other slide-film, which uses the E-6 processing method, Kodachrome required a special processing method that only Kodak itself provided and it was therefore much more of a hassle (and expensive) to get it developed. It was necessary for photographers to send their film to Kodak laboratories and wait for the slides to return developed in the mail. It was not possible to get it developed in one's local laboratory. This inconvenience, along with the fact that most photographers no longer use film, led to increasingly low sales which prompted Kodak to retire its most iconic film product.

Some of the twentieth century's most famous photographs were taken using Kodachrome film, such as Steve McCurry's famous portrait of the "Afghan Girl," shown on the left.

"I want to take (the last roll) with me and somehow make every frame count ... just as a way to honor the memory and always be able to look back with fond memories at how it capped and ended my shooting Kodachrome," McCurry said last week from Singapore, where he has an exhibition at the Asian Civilizations Museum.*

Kodachrome developed a strong cult following. Henceforth dozens of websites are devoted to it. On Flickr, for instance, groups such as "Kodachrome" and "Vintage Kodachrome" receive uploads on a daily basis.

We can only hope that Fujifilm doesn't discontinue Velvia in the near future...

*Source: Carolyn Thomson, "Sorry, Paul Simon, Kodak's taking Kodachrome away." 22 June 2009. Associated Press, 22 June 2009 <http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090622/ap_on_re_us/us_kodachrome_s_demise>.