Kodak announced it is killing off Kodachrome color film, which I thought had already been done by digital film a while back.
As much as I love digital pictures, there is something magical about the color film process that I think we're going to lose. Sure, the digital pictures are flawless--or can be made so with Photoshop--it's the imperfections that sometimes make the shot more interesting, much the way vinyl records added something to music. With only a limited number of frames to shoot, one either had to get the shot, or lived with the imperfect shot. Today, I can shoot 200 frames and either pick the best, or morph several inferior shots into one perfect image. Perfection isn't romantic.
Most of my childhood memories are relived through photographs--many of them stamped with the Kodachrome mark at the bottom. (For those of you too young to remember: we took the pictures, and then sent them out to be printed, and got them back weeks later with a white border around our small 3x3 picture... and we liked it! Then Polaroid came out with their instamatic and photography went to hell...). I feel for those people that love their film and won't go digital, what will they do now?
Truth be told, I haven't bought film in years... and even then I used Agfa film (it was European and so much cooler if you were a photography student...).
Life moves on, but we still have Paul Simon's song...
Posts
3 comments:
I heard this and was a little sad. Ah, the memories of photography class: fumbling in the dark to unwind the film and prepare it for processing, the smell of the chemicals in the dark room and, best of all, watching your photographs slowly appear! Of course, there's also the crushing disappointment of realizing an entire roll of film is somehow ruined--doesn't happen with digital!
I miss film, but I haven't used my film camera since getting my digital in 2000.
Valerie: ditto. I love my digital camera. Worse, when I did use film, I preferred black & white. I'm going to hell...
Post a Comment