For Kodachrome Fans, Road Ends at Photo Lab in Kansas

New York Times ^ | December 30, 2010 | A. G. SULZBERGER

[Second Amendment First]

PARSONS, Kan. — An unlikely pilgrimage is under way to Dwayne’s Photo, a small family business that has through luck and persistence become the last processor in the world of Kodachrome, the first successful color film and still the most beloved.

That celebrated 75-year run from mainstream to niche photography is scheduled to come to an end on Thursday when the last processing machine is shut down here to be sold for scrap.

In the last weeks, dozens of visitors and thousands of overnight packages have raced here, transforming this small prairie-bound city not far from the Oklahoma border for a brief time into a center of nostalgia for the days when photographs appeared not in the sterile frame of a computer screen or in a pack of flimsy prints from the local drugstore but in the warm glow of a projector pulling an image from a carousel of vivid slides.

In the span of minutes this week, two such visitors arrived. The first was a railroad worker who had driven from Arkansas to pick up 1,580 rolls of film that he had just paid $15,798 to develop. The second was an artist who had driven directly here after flying from London to Wichita, Kan., on her first trip to the United States to turn in three rolls of film and shoot five more before the processing deadline.

The artist, Aliceson Carter, 42, was incredulous as she watched the railroad worker, Jim DeNike, 53, loading a dozen boxes that contained nearly 50,000 slides into his old maroon Pontiac. He explained that every picture inside was of railroad trains and that he had borrowed money from his father’s retirement account to pay for developing them.

[Osage Orange]

I've a Nikon FM black 35 mm...camera..that I paid something like $400 bucks for in the late 70's..early 80's.

It's worth about $35..now, if that! Ha!!

I burnt a lot of film thru that baby...Always clicked when you pressed the button.

Digital so much easier....but I'm gonna miss KodaChrome 64

[Osage Orange]

I also have many photos printed on real photo paper, rather than use ink jets. Most Walgreens have Fuji Frontier photo processing machines that will take jpegs and make real prints that look great.

Bingo!!

[Osage Orange]

My cousin Jimmy had that camera....

I bet some of those pic's are still around!!

[ridesthemiles]

I have told people for years not to do what you did.

What is worse? Putting all the photos on CD’s & then DESTROYING all the originals.

Beyond stupid.

I have photos of my father- who would have been 102 this year & his father, etc, which are priceless to me.

i would NEVER destroy them, even if I did spend the time to put them on CD’s.

When people realize that their wedding photos & first born kid photos are deteriorating, they will be very angry.,

[ridesthemiles]

I still have those ‘one time use’ cameras & I have photos in them that need developing.

Are you telling me that I now cannot get them developed???

Please advise. IMMEDIATELY!!

[archivist007]

I had a lot my digital photos stored on CDs. The disks have gone bad, and the computer can no longer read the files, so I have lost several years worth of photos. I suspect a lot of people are in the same boat, but they don’t know it yet. The best way to save photos is to print them out. There is no guarantee that digitally stored files will be readable in the future, as I have found from sad peraonal experience. On the other hand, we don’t have a long track record on photos printed by ink jet printers. Will they still be of good quality 20 years from now? It may be that 20 years from now, we will wish we still had Kodachrome. We know that pictures taken using that technology will last.

I have also lost many years of digital photos too. The ones from earlier on that were taken with a film camera are still around. I have a feeling that because we are in a digital age, knowledge and history will lost because the data will be corrupt or become unreadable. The end of the motion picture Escape from LA comes to mind.

[ridesthemiles]

I still have those ‘one time use’ cameras & I have photos in them that need developing.

Are you telling me that I now cannot get them developed???

Please advise. IMMEDIATELY!!

[SeeSac]

I had a lot my digital photos stored on CDs. The disks have gone bad, and the computer can no longer read the files, so I have lost several years worth of photos.

I still have CDs that are as old as the technology that read fine. I have other newer CDs that are unreadable because I didn't take proper care of them. If printed photos are treated the way some people treat their CDs they would not last long either.

I also have all my photo files existing on my computer, on a backup disk and on my pocket drive. Each time my operating system is updated, I ensure fresh copies are made.

[Captain Peter Blood]

They did not say 35mm film only the kodak Slide Film. 35mm can still be processed.

[Captain Peter Blood]

I ran a photo lab for WalMart for several years and of course I saw the arrival of digital and the demise of film and it happened rather quickly.
As easy and convenient as Digital is I still believe that Film captures things Digital never will.
35mm should still be around for a long time but specialty stuff is going fast.

[Old Student]

“It’s weird, the shutter system on the digital is noisier than the 7E. I can’t fathom why.”

So you can tell the photo has been taken. My little Samsung Digimax L60 allows you to turn the shutter sound off. There is no NEED for a shutter, and no actual sound, they just put it there so people wouldn't gripe about not being able to tell when their photo had been captured.

Bit of trivia: for years, SLR’s weren't allowed in courtrooms. You had to have something no louder than the shutter on Leica’s rangefinder cameras to avoid disturbing the court.

[reagan_fanatic]

Did your Polaroid film come with the little brush in a tube that smelt of vinegar (or was it elderberries—I forget)?

Not the one I had. When you took a picture it would spit it out the front, and was covered with a black piece of plastic film. You peeled the plastic off and threw it away. I remember the warnings about not touching the developer solution on the plastic as it would do funny things to your skin. I think it took about a minute or two for the picture to fully develop. Pretty cool technology for the time.

[meyer]

There is no NEED for a shutter, and no actual sound, they just put it there so people wouldn't gripe about not being able to tell when their photo had been captured.

There is a need for a shutter on these digital bodies...

Really depends on the type of digital camera and its use. All of my DSLR bodies have shutters, even though you can open the shutter and use live view or video mode on my newer bodies. There are a couple of good reasons for the shutter - one is to protect the sensor from very bright lights (the sun through a telephoto lens will cook a sensor in very short order). It also serves as a dust cover, and provides very precise timing for exposure. Yes, digital cameras can perform "shutter speed" electronically, but I'm not aware of any that can shoot at 1/4000 or 1/8000 of a second without the shutter mechanism.

[oh8eleven]

This delay is one of the most annoying things ever.
It's called shutter lag. You can overcome it for most situations by pushing down slightly on the shutter button (while looking at your subject) and holding it there.
You'll hear your camera lens come into focus. If all looks good, push the shutter button down the rest of way to take the picture with zero lag.
I think most digital cameras have this capability.

[meyer]

See all those big white lenses at sporting events around the world? They all have Canon EOS-1D's hung on their hind ends.

Nikon's got some speed demons as well. Actually, even my 5DII, judged to be sluggish by today's DSLR standards, is pretty doggone fast. And my 7D comes very close to the speed of those 1-series Canons. It can also be seen with a big white lens attached from time to time. :-)

[Inyo-Mono]

I got my first Polaroid camera in the mid ‘60s. It was B&W only. Each picture was developed with a little roll shaped brush that put a layer of pink gelatin developer on the photo. I still have the photos and they are in very good shape. They look like little tintypes.

For anyone who wants to have a permanent portrait of themselves for posterity, I would recommend having a B&W photo shot on film and then printed on archival paper. I have an original photo of my 2 times great-grandfather (he was born in 1799) taken around 1855 or so that is still in near perfect condition.

[TheSarce]

I still have those ‘one time use’ cameras & I have photos in them that need developing. Are you telling me that I now cannot get them developed???

No, those are a different kind of film than Kodachrome (which is slide film, process K-14), the disposables are loaded with color PRINT film (negatives, process C-41).

It's only one type of SLIDE film, Kodachrome, that we will no longer be able to get developed. And the other types of slide films, Ektachrome and all the other process E-6 films will still have developing available. Just no more K-14.

But you SHOULD get your C-41 print/negative film stuff developed soon, it does deteriorate and color shift with age when shot and not developed. About three years ago, I found several rolls of print film that had sat in a box undeveloped for over seventeen years. Upon processing, they were DRASTICALLY grainier and fuzzier than they would have been if I'd had them developed promptly. (It WAS worth developing them, despite the degraded images, in case you're wondering.)

I have just spent every spare moment of the last 5-6 weeks digging through uncounted boxes of my stuff in storage, looking for any undeveloped rolls of Kodachrome I might have. I finally quit last night when it was too late to make the final Fed Ex shipment to Dwaynes. I found around two dozen scattered rolls of unprocessed print film (including, to my horror, the only roll I shot of Halley's Comet in 1986! Shot on Kodacolor 1000, notorious even back then for fogging if left undeveloped beyond its expiration date--wonder if there's even any point 24 years later?), but no Kodachrome... but I STRONGLY suspect that several rolls I shot of a couple of bands back in 1990 WERE on Kodachrome. The rolls from those gigs never turned up during my search, some day they WILL surface, and there will be no way to get them developed. Lost forever...

RIP, Kodachrome, you were THE reference point for everything photographic....

[beelzepug]

I saved the metal ones for years - yellow tops and green (Tri-X) tops - as well as plain ones. My wife uses them for seed containers in our little greenhouse. I shot a lot of that stuff in Vietnam, mostly Tri-X and Kodacolor-X.

[Old Student]

” There are a couple of good reasons for the shutter - one is to protect the sensor from very bright lights (the sun through a telephoto lens will cook a sensor in very short order).”

No, not really. A Lens Cap serves as a lens cap. You can burn through the shutter of a film SLR with a telephoto lens pointed at the sun, too. Especially on the focal plane shutters most film SLRs used. It was rubberized cloth. The later ones had metal focal plane shutters, but even those could be damaged that way, and the hot spot on the shutter can't much good for your film, either. I suspect that would be true on a digital camera, as well, having spent some time as an electronics tech.

“It also serves as a dust cover, and provides very precise timing for exposure.”

Can't argue with that, as I got out of the photo business back when digital cameras were in the $10K range. I still have my Canon A1, but it is dying, and too expensive to fix right now. Either the mirror pivots are worn out, or some other problem has happened to cause the mirror to move VERY slowly when the shutter is released. I've also got an Elan 7E, but not gotten to play with it much. Film cameras have gotten to expensive to play with. The A1 has had over 10,000 rolls of film through it; I used it professionally from 1980 to 1985, working as an Air Force photographer.

BTW, are you a John D. MacDonald/Travis McGee fan?

Old Student

[AFreeBird]

That’s typically not a problem on a DSLR as you still get the mirror response when the shutter trips. And since you no longer have film advance, it should be quieter.