Posted on 12/30/2010 4:04:06 AM PST by Second Amendment First
PARSONS, Kan. An unlikely pilgrimage is under way to Dwaynes 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 fathers retirement account to pay for developing them.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
We’ve migrated from a society of sentimentality and keepsakes to a society of disposal and short-term use. My children won’t see nearly as much of me as they will of my parents and those before them since most of my photos are on password-protected disk drives with high-level encryption.
It’s a hassle to continuously migrate your pictures to new devices, but continuously backing them up will ensure that they last forever.
There are also optical disks out there with a guaranteed 30-year life span, and some high-level backup systems use DVDs with protective cases that are guaranteed for 50 years. They’re available to the public, but be prepared to pay the price for archival. Disk drives are better IMO.
Get yourself a couple 1TB external USB drives to store your images and files on.
It all depends on how you manage your digital media. BTW: I think you meant to respond to another poster.
Re: lifetime of inkjet prints
I saw some beautiful (and expensive) prints of artist paintings and asked a gallery employee how they were made. He said with a large inkjet printer.
The lifetime of a print depends on the ink and paper, not the method of putting the ink onto the paper.
(at least I still have all my beautiful slides)
I liked K200
Aluminum
The song was banned in England.
Kodachrome was a brand name and banned because it sounded like a commercial.
One of my favorite songs. I remember diggin’ to it on the radio when I was a kid. The melody is just infectious, and it captures the glorious feeling of summer just perfectly.
Sad to see the film age come to an end. I’ve been into photography ever since my Parents bought me a Polaroid instant camera, you know, the one where you pulled the picture out of the front of the camera and had to wait a minute or so for it to develop before you pulled the paper off of it. I have a Canon T2i now, but I do miss the old cameras.
At least there’s still E-6.
Yieks. One of the most disturbing films I have watched.
Ink is ...well, INK.
It isn’t silver emulsion & will never achieve the depth of that medium.
I can still use my enlarger if I can covert the digital medium to film, but again, ink is just ink
The best job I ever had was working in the film processing biz back in the 80’s.
I worked at a plant on the left coast that did all the film that was dropped off at Targets across the nation. What a fun gig!
I never thought I’d see the day.
How sad.
I have about a dozen rolls of film that I never had developed, I was wondering the same thing...What do I do?
Some of the new Digital SLRs can use the old lenses. Do a search on the internet and see if you're lenses can be used. Unfortunately for me, Minolta lenses aren't one of them. I have a couple of thousand dollars invested in Minolta equipment that's practically useless now.
I heard about CD rot about a decade ago. Luckily, I transferred everything to a hard drive, I now have my pictures saved 3 times on 3 hard drives, the newest being purchased 1 year ago, I figure if I buy a new hard drive every 5 years or so, retiring the oldest drive as I go, I hava a shot of keeping my photos.
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