A Brief History of Kodak Kodachrome Film - TIME
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Steve McCurry / MagnumAn iconic Kodachrome picture of an Afghan girl at Nasir Bagh refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1984
It wasn't easy being green. Or yellow or red or blue, for that matter. While color photography had been around in one form or another since the 1860s, until the Eastman Kodak Company came out with its Kodachrome film in 1935, those wishing to capture a color image had to deal with heavy glass plates, tripods, long exposures and an exacting development procedure, all of which resulted in less than satisfactory pictures — dull, tinted images that were far from true to life. So while Kodak's discontinuation of the iconic color film will affect only the most devoted photo buffs — sales of Kodachrome account for less than 1% of the company's revenue — the June 22 announcement breaks one of the largest remaining ties to the era of pre-digital photography. It also ends a legacy that includes some of the most enduring images of 20th century America.
The Kodachrome process — in which three emulsions, each sensitive to a primary color, are coated on a single film base — was the brainchild of Leopold Godowsky Jr. and Leopold Mannes, two musicians turned scientists who worked at Kodak's research facility in Rochester, N.Y.
Disappointed by the poor quality of a "color" movie they saw in 1916, the two Leopolds spent years perfecting their technique, which Kodak first utilized in 1935 in 16-mm movie film. The next year, they tried out the process on film for still cameras, although the procedure was not for the hobbyist: the earliest 35-mm Kodachrome went for $3.50 a roll, or about $54 in today's dollars.
While all color films have dyes printed directly onto the film stock, Kodachrome's dye isn't added until the development process. "The film itself is basically black and white," says Grant Steinle, vice president of operations at Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kans., the only photo-processing center still equipped to develop Kodachrome film. Steinle says that although all dyes will fade over time, if Kodachrome is stored properly it can be good for up to 100 years. The film's archival abilities, coupled with its comparative ease of use, made it the dominant film for both professionals and amateurs for most of the 20th century. Kodachrome captured a color version of the Hindenburg's fireball explosion in 1936.
It accompanied Edmund Hillary to the top of Mount Everest in 1953. Abraham Zapruder was filming with 8-mm Kodachrome in Dallas when he accidentally captured President Kennedy's assassination. National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry used it to capture the haunting green-gray eyes of an Afghan refugee girl in 1985 in what is still the magazine's most enduring cover image.
For 20 years, anyone wishing to develop Kodachrome film had to send it to a Kodak laboratory, which controlled all processing. In 1954, the Department of Justice declared Kodachrome-processing a monopoly, and the company agreed to allow other finishing plants the price of a roll of film — which previously had the processing cost added into it — fell roughly 43%.
Kodachrome's popularity peaked in the 1960s and '70s, when Americans' urge to catalog every single holiday, family vacation and birthday celebration hit its stride. Kodachrome II, a faster, more versatile version of the film, came out in 1961, making it even more appealing to the
point-and-shoot generation. Super 8, a low-speed fine-grain Kodachrome movie film, was released in 1965 — and was used to film seemingly every wedding, beach holiday and backyard barbecue for the next decade. (Aficionados can check out the opening credits of the '80s coming-of-age drama The Wonder Years for a quick hit of nostalgia.) When Paul Simon sang, "Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away" in 1973, Kodak was still expanding its Kodachrome line, and it was hard to believe that it would ever disappear. But by the mid-1980s, video camcorders and more easily processed color film from companies like Fuji and Polaroid
encroached on Kodachrome's market share, and the film fell into disfavor. Compared to the newer technology, Kodachrome was a pain to develop. It required a large processing machine and several different chemicals and over a dozen processing steps. The film would never, ever be able to make the "one-hour photo" deadline that customers increasingly came to expect. Finally in the early 2000s came the digital-ph digital sales today account for more than 70% of Kodak's revenue.
Kodak quit the film-processing business in 1988 and slowly began to disengage from film-manufacturing. Super 8 went by the wayside in 2007. By 2008 Kodak was producing only one Kodachrome film run — a mile-long sheet cut into 20,000 rolls — a year, and the number of centers able to process it had declined precipitously. Today, Steinle's Kansas store processes all of Kodak's Kodachrome film — if you drop a roll off at your local Wal-Mart, it will be developed at Dwayne's Photo — and though it is the only center left in the world, the company processes only a few hundred rolls a day.
Kodachrome 64 slide film, discontinued on June 22, was the last type of true Kodachrome available — although the company expects existing stocks to last well into the fall.
Kodak plans to donate the last remaining rolls of Kodachrome film to the George Eastman House's photography museum. One of them will be symbolically shot by McCurry — although the famed photographer gave up the format long ago. In fact, McCurry's photographic career perfectly traces the rise and fall of Kodak film. He shot his iconic Afghan-girl portrait on Kodachrome and returned 17 years later to photograph the same woman with Kodak's easier-to-develop Ektachrome. Now, he relies on digital.
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<img src="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/dc_iu=//DFPAudiencePixel ; dc_seg=;ord=1?" width=1 height=1 border=0/>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A single slide, showing a color transparency in a plastic frame
A slide projector, showing the lens and a typical double slide carrier.
In , reversal film is a type of
that produces a positive image on a
base. The film is processed to produce transparencies or diapositives (abbreviated as "diafilm" in many countries) instead of
and . Reversal film is produced in various sizes, from
to 8×10 inch .
A slide is a specially mounted individual transparency intended for projection onto a screen using a . This allows the photograph to be viewed by a large audience at once. The most common form is the 35&#160;mm slide, with the image framed in a 2×2 inch cardboard or plastic mount. Some specialized labs produce photographic slides from digital camera images in formats such as , from computer-generated presentation graphics, and from a wide variety of physical source material such as fingerprints, microscopic sections, paper documents, astronomical images, etc.
Reversal film is sometimes used as , mostly in the ,
, to yield a positive image on the camera original. This avoids the expense of using negative film, which requires additional film and processing to create a positive
for projection.
Additive metho and commercially successful
reversal process was the
, introduced in 1907. This was an
method, using a
emulsion coated on a thin glass plate previously coated with a layer of dyed
grains. Autochrome plates were discontinued in the 1930s after the introduction of Lumière Filmcolor in
and Lumicolor in
sizes. Also using the additive principle and reversal processing were the
color screen plates and films and
film, all of which were discontinued by 1961.
and , working with the , developed , the first commercially successful color film to use the
method. Kodachrome was introduced in 1935 as 16mm , and in 1936 as
film for still cameras. The Kodachrome films contained n these were added during processing.
In late 1936,
was launched,
having overcome earlier difficulties with color sensitivity problems. This film had the dye couplers incorporated into the emulsion, making processing simpler than for Kodachrome.
This section needs additional citations for . Please help
by . Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2009)
had many shortcomings, including the high cost of the film, processing and printing, the mediocre color quality, rapid fading and discoloration of highlights
of some types of print that became noticeable after several years. Amateurs who owned projection equipment used reversal films extensively because the cost of projection equipment and slide film was offset by not having to pay for prints. Eventually, print quality improved and prices decreased, and, by the 1970s, color negative film and color prints had largely displaced slides as the primary method of amateur photography.
Until about 1995, color transparency was preferred for publication, and was widely used in commercial and
photography, reportage, sports, stock and nature photography.
media gradually replaced transparency film.
All color reversal film sold today is developed with the . The non-substantive
films, the last of which was discontinued in 2009, were processed with the .
produced an
slide film called . It was packaged in cassettes like normal
film. A separate processing unit was used to develop it after exposure.
This section needs additional citations for . Please help
by . Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2009)
Black-and-white transparencies can be made directly with some modern
films, which normally yield negatives. The negative image is developed but not fixed. The negative image is removed by bleaching with a solution of
in dilute , which is removed by
and a clearing bath containing
or . The remaining silver halide salts are re-exposed to light, developed and fixed, and the film is washed and dried.
Black-and-white transparencies were once popular for presentation of lecture materials using 31/4 by 4" (31/4" square in the UK) glass-mounted slides. Such positive black-and-white projection is now rarely done, except in motion pictures. Even where black-and-white positives are currently used, the process to create them typically uses an internegative with standard processing instead of a chemical reversal process.
Black-and-white reversal films are less common than color reversal films.
discontinued its Agfa Scala 200x Professional black-and-white reversal film. This could be developed with their proprietary Scala process.
company of the
produces the only remaining dedicated black-and-white reversal film for 35&#160;mm stills, Fomapan R 100, which is also available in
& Foma currently produce kits for reversal processing.
formerly offered a kit ("Direct Positive Film Developing Outfit") for reversal processing of its now-discontinued
film, which doubled the effective film speed from 32 to 64. The bleaching bath used potassium dichromate
the redeveloper was a fogging developer, and so unstable that its shelf-life after mixing was only slightly longer than the amount of time needed to process a single roll. This was replaced with a "T-Max Direct Positive Film Developing Outfit," which uses potassium permanganate and sulfuric acid in the bleach. In this kit, the fogging redeveloper is stable, but the bleach is not, with a shelf-life, once mixed, of no more than two weeks.
process, which produces black-and-white transparencies from most traditional halide (i.e., non-chromogenic) black-and-white negative films.
Kodak Tri-X Reversal Film 7266 and Kodak Plus-X Reversal Film 7265 are black-and-white reversal films used for movie making.
Reversal films are the preferred film choice of professional photographers for images intended for reproduction in print media. This is because of the films' high contrast and high image resolution compared to negative (print) films.
Main articles:
Slide projector Leitz Prado
Finished transparencies are most frequently displayed by projection. Some projectors use a sliding mechanism to manually pull the transparency out of the side of the machine, where it is replaced by the next image. Modern, advanced projectors typically use a carousel that holds a la a mechanism automatically pulls a single slide from the carousel and places it in front of the lamp. Small externally lit or battery-powered magnifying viewers are available.
Slide frames, 1940 (metal or card) to 1985 (plastic)
Slide viewer
Slide viewer
Slide archive box
Slide frame 6×6&#160;cm
Slide frames 6×6 centimeters (2.4&#160;in)
A type 120 reversal film from the mid-1950s: the Italian Ferraniacolor
Various print and online sources offer discontinuation dates ranging from 1932 to 1938.
A.L.M. Sowerby (ed.) (1961). Dictionary of Photography: A Reference Book for Amateur and Professional Photographers (19th Ed.). London: Iliffe Books Ltd. pp.&#160;126–132.
shows examples of the severe yellowing eventually produced by this staining and briefly explains the cause. This was a problem with early Kodacolor prints.
. Condé Nast Digital. 30 June .
unknown (September 2003).
(PDF). Ilford Imaging UK Ltd 2009.
unknown (2004). . FOMA BOHEMIA, spol. s r.o 2009.
(PDF) 2012.
(PDF). Palomar College Facilities Dept 2012.
. Eastman Kodak Company. .[]
. Eastman Kodak Company. .[]
Langford, Michael (2000). Basic Photography (7th Ed.). Oxford: Focal Press. &#160;.
description
(B&W reversal)
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: Hidden categories:Kodachrome film is seriously at the end of its life -- again
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Kodachrome film is iconic enough that there have now been several '' news stories, and we just couldn't resist one more. This time, our tale is of Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas (which we've had occasion to ), a film processing store which has the distinction of being the final place to accept Kodachrome for development. The problem? The store has been flooded with packages of undeveloped film from all over the world as the window for its processing comes to an end. It turns out that having that distinction will get you hundreds of rolls of film a day, and Dwayne's Photo said that it would not process any films that arrived after Thursday. Yes, that was yesterday, though the mail is undoubtedly still arriving.
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