Before I got into digital, I shot Kodachrome 25. Lots and lots of it. From the Seattle Times:
Sorry, Paul Simon, Kodak's taking Kodachrome away
Sorry, Paul Simon, Kodak is taking your Kodachrome away.
The Eastman Kodak Co. announced Monday it's retiring its oldest film stock because of declining customer demand in an increasingly digital age.
The world's first commercially successful color film, immortalized in song by Simon, spent 74 years in Kodak's portfolio. It enjoyed its heyday in the 1950s and '60s but in recent years has nudged closer to obscurity: Sales of Kodachrome are now just a fraction of 1 percent of the company's total sales of still-picture films, and only one commercial lab in the world still processes it.
Those numbers and the unique materials needed to make it convinced Kodak to call its most recent manufacturing run the last, said Mary Jane Hellyar, the outgoing president of Kodak's Film, Photofinishing and Entertainment Group.
"Kodachrome is particularly difficult (to retire) because it really has become kind of an icon," Hellyar said.
Well crap. I am not going back to film any time soon, digital gives me good image quality plus a lot of advantages but still, this is really the end of an era. Kodachrome had the most wonderful color, vibrant and accurate. I am in the DaveCave(tm) and about five feet away are several large boxes of Kodachrome slides -- several thousand shot over forty years of photography...
