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Kodachrome - The Long Farewell

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tokengirl

Guest
We've known the end is near for quite a while now. Now it's imminent, if your film is not at Dwayne's by noon on December 30th, you're **** out of luck.

If you have any Kodachrome shots you'd like to share (new or old), post them here.

A few from a walk on South Beach on a cool, windy morning. Taken with the Fuji Klasse W.











Scanning these things was an interesting journey. Both Silverfast and Vuescan produced frighteningly saturated and contrasty scans. Interestingly, the EpsonScan software with color correction turned on produced very realistic results that needed very little work.
 
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tetsrfun

Guest
We've known the end is near for quite a while now. Now it's imminent, if your film is not at Dwayne's by noon on December 30th, you're **** out of luck.

If you have any Kodachrome shots you'd like to share (new or old), post them here.

A few from a walk on South Beach on a cool, windy morning. Taken with the Fuji Klasse W.

Scanning these things was an interesting journey. Both Silverfast and Vuescan produced frighteningly saturated and contrasty scans. Interestingly, the EpsonScan software with color correction turned on produced very realistic results that needed very little work.
********
" Both Silverfast and Vuescan produced frighteningly saturated.."

Probably explains one reason why Silverfast has recently added Kodachrome IT8 calibration targets.

And terrific beach images.

Steve
 

Jorgen Udvang

Subscriber Member
Fantastic photos and a great tribute to a film that became an institution. It's a sad fact that it's going just when I'm taking up film photography again.
 

m_driscoll

New member
Claire: Those are brilliant! Composition, film and scans...the works. I've got EpsonScan, but always use Silverfast. I'm going to try it again on the Velvia to see what I get.

I sent about two dozen rolls to Dwayne's last Spring. Unfortunately they were decades old and quite faded. Though, a few shots of my daughter were worth the expense.

Cheers, Matt

http://mdriscoll.zenfolio.com
 

pfigen

Member
The base density of Kodachrome is actually quite blue compared to most E-6 films. If you scan Kodachrome using an E-6 scanner profile, things can go wonky fast. When I scan Kodachrome, the black border comes up with the blue channel at about 25 or so, which is it's real color, but not what you need to make a good scan. I override that black point and manually set the blue down to around 4 or 5 and that seems to fix all the color problems, making the scan look very very close to the original. I'm using a Hutchcolor Velvia 4X5 custom measured target, and overall, it's great for every film I've thrown at it. I've still got some to shoot before the end of the year. Hope to get out to Salton Sea in the next month to use up what I've got. Here are a couple old K-64 shots, one from a project on Otis Elevators I did in school - the GG Bridge has an Otis - and the other an advertising sign for Bucking Horse Lodge outside of W. Rawlins, Wyoming, shot on one of my many road trips years ago. For years I never bothered to figure out what the sign actually said, and when I finally did a couple years back, I Googled the place and found out it had the worse fleabag revues ever. Still, a great sign.
 

ustein

Contributing Editor
Great beach photos.

Here are some of our few Kodachrome images from 1977-1980 (Nikon F2s) that got scanned.







 
T

tokengirl

Guest
an advertising sign for Bucking Horse Lodge outside of W. Rawlins, Wyoming, shot on one of my many road trips years ago. For years I never bothered to figure out what the sign actually said, and when I finally did a couple years back, I Googled the place and found out it had the worse fleabag revues ever. Still, a great sign.
To me, this one is absolutely a classic Kodachrome look, with it's perfect balance of red/yellow/blue, not to mention the kitschy subject matter. :thumbup:
 
L

LStRomain

Guest
I aquired a couple of rolls of Kodachrome when I purchased a Kodak Retina IIa off of ebay ... I think the film must has not been stored in optinum conditions since there is a color shift but here are some of them:



 

pfigen

Member
On a bicycle trip in 1980 from Monterey to Seattle and back, this blocked my view of the Golden Gate Bridge - looking south. I jokingly turned it in as an "extra" assignment in a fashion photography class at Art Center under the general assignment category of "full figure, fashion". The instructor not only didn't get the joke, but when it was explained to her, failed to see the humor. I got a "C" in the class. Oh well.

Oh yeah - K64. Nikon FM. 24mm 2.8. I think I shot two frames. Being that close with a wide angle, I didn't feel like hanging around and making myself obvious.
 
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Cindy Flood

Super Moderator
Hi Louise,
Welcome to the forum. Great first post. I really like the first one. It is moody and the dusty colors add to the mood.
I'm looking forward to more from you.


I aquired a couple of rolls of Kodachrome when I purchased a Kodak Retina IIa off of ebay ... I think the film must has not been stored in optinum conditions since there is a color shift but here are some of them:



 
T

tokengirl

Guest
Re: Kodachrome - The Final Chapter

Well, I got my last 4 rolls back from Dwayne's today. :cry:

Here are my three favorites form the roll I shot in my XPan:








More later from the other three rolls.
 

pfigen

Member
Very nice images. I love the feel of desolation and loneliness which is accentuated by the panorama format. Well done. Those are the type of images you can sell to people like Deborah Roundtree - who places art in places like hospitals and hotels. It can be surprisingly lucrative if they buy enough prints.

Gee and I went out to the Salton Sea last weekend for photography and music, in El Centro of all places. Shot seven or eight rolls of K64, but am going to finish as much off this weekend and get it off to Dwayne's just in time for final processing. You should see some images perhaps after winter NAMM toward the end of January. I also found two rolls of PKM in the fridge dated about 1990. Gonna try 'em out anyway.
 

photoSmart42

New member
Just shot my last four rolls in NYC over the weekend. Can't wait to see how they came out. In the meantime, here are some I shot a few months ago:

Kodachrome 64
Canon F-1; FD 35/2 SSC Concave
Little Italy, San Diego farmers' market




 

bensonga

Well-known member
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/us/30film.html?hp

Truly, the passing of an era.

Here's a link to some images taken during the earliest days of Kodachrome's long reign.

http://extras.denverpost.com/archive/captured.html

Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-1943
=============================
From Publishers Weekly
Taken from 1939 to 1943 under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information, these 175 "lost" photos feature shots by Russell Lee, Andreas Feininger and Marion Post Wolcott, using the then-revolutionary technology of Kodachrome film. Color photographs taken before 1939 have largely deteriorated, so these surviving photos are later than the most familiar b&w Depression-era shots. This 11¾"×8½" volume thus "colorizes" one's normally black-and-white impressions of a very vibrant time, as Hendrickson (Sons of Mississippi) notes in his introduction. The logic behind the arrangement of the photos, which at first seems largely random, as it follows neither photographer, location nor chronology, becomes clear by the end of the book: the U.S.'s industrial rise. Images of urban lethargy and farmhands picking cotton under hot blue skies (the unbearable conditions of cotton-picking somehow seem more apparent in color) gradually give way to images of mobility, mechanization and a changing economy. Arnold T. Palmer's gleaming portraits of Rosie the riveter–like aircraft workers follow Jack Delano's earthier photos of male railroad workers, their sweaty and intent faces caked with soot. Tellingly, the book ends with photos of bombers flying over California.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
 

pfigen

Member
Those are absolutely amazing images, particularly places like Dillon, Mt., which haven't changed all that much. Next time I go there I'm going to have to look for that corner, but it shouldn't be hard as the downtown area is only a few blocks.

I love the intimate details like what looks to be a Rawlings welding glove. We thought they only made baseball mitts. Or the dinner serving plate on top of the Karo can, and the colors of the clothes that we only see represented in black and white. And that quite a few were shot on 4x5, including the aerial shot. The ISO of Kodachrome back then, according to what I've read was 10 and 12. That alone makes a lot of the interior scenes all the more amazing considering the average lens speed then was not what we have today.

I only wish I could have had a crack at scanning these on my drum scanner. It would be interesting to see how some would have cleaned up.

I should have a few of my own to scan in the next few weeks, including a couple of rolls of twenty year old K25 I shot the night before last. It will be interesting to see what that looks like.
 

photoSmart42

New member
A few more. I just called Dwayne's to make sure my last rolls would be developed, and they said they'd make it since the mail got there this past Monday. Yay!





 
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