Kodachrome

The last roll of Kodak Kodachrome film, used by National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry, is being turned over to George Eastman House.
“I never used Kodachrome,” I said to my wife.
It’s slide-film, which didn’t fit what I was doing at that time.
During the ‘70s, I tried to become a freelance photographer.
I had a darkroom, and engineered my own black & white processing.
Black & white was still the preferred photo-printing medium of most journalism, plus it could be very expressive.
Color printing was in its infancy.
All the color printing you saw was in National Geographic and its ilk.
Some magazines were trying it, but the ones I was selling to were still printing black & white.
Beyond that, color took the processing out of your darkroom.
In the darkroom things were under your control.
Hand your color film over to Kodak, and processing was no longer yours.
With a darkroom you were controlling your image output.
I was using Acufine®, an extremely powerful film-developer.
I used to say it was “very hot.”
It pushed the effective film-speed of Tri-X from 400 to 1200 or more.
Soup it long enough, and you got 2400, although grainy.
I could pull images out of fog at 2400, and shoot available light (hand-held) at 1200.
Acufine bleached Plus-X out of sight. It always did; even just a dunk.
Panatomic-X was marginal, but acceptable. 32 ASA up to about 100.
Tri-X was best. Barely dip (“kiss”) the film with Acufine, and it rendered fabulous shadow-detail I could print.
So what was happening was I avoided Kodachrome because I was doing well enough with Tri-X.
It’s kind of the way I am now. Loath to experiment when I can do well enough with what I have.
I could buy a Nikon CoolScan to scan negatives; I tried one a few years ago at Visual Studies Workshop, and it was great.
But I don’t, because I don’t do much with images anyway, and rarely with my old color negatives.
I hardly shot slide-film, and when I did it was Ektachrome®.
What color I shot was Kodacolor negative-film, the choice of the Instamatic crowd, except I was using a good camera — my old Pentax Spotmatic.
Now everything I shoot is digital, and it’s all color.
I also now just shoot and see what happens.
There’s input on my part, but it’s not dependable.
I get extraordinary photographs, but many that just bomb.
I got an extraordinary photograph a few years ago, so I set up again at the same location.
Bomb city!
My darkroom equipment is stored, and good riddance.
The advantage to digital is no chemicals.
My darkroom is Photoshop on this computer.
“Kodachrome sort of exaggerated colors,” I said.
“It became a form of expression, but Kodak, not the photographer, whose only choice was to use it.
It wasn’t extreme, as some color films were.”
It’s sad I never tried it, but color was sort of intimidating at that time.
Black & white was bad enough. Things would be in my image I hadn’t noticed when I took the photograph, like water-towers and telephone-poles, etc.
Throw in color, and you get segments of red or blue or green that dominate a picture — and thus distract from its content.
Sadly, I never tried Kodachrome.

• “George Eastman House” is the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, NY. (It used to be George Eastman’s mansion. Eastman was the founder of Kodak.)
• “Visual Studies Workshop” is a local school of photography.