One has to look at film, lighting and the way we see as oppossed to the temperature of the film. Fuji film was much cooler as opposed to Kodachrome. How our skin and surroundings are portrayed realistically is a horse of a different color. Now the question is does color change in motion?

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

Of course I have no idea what I'm talking about -- B&W I've processed, but not color -- but I would think for $15,000 our fellow Arkansan could have bought the lab's equipment and set up his own processing lab. No?

Ah, the stock market . . .
Something I've always been curious about -- back in 8th grade business math, when we covered how to read the stock market report, I "bought" 10 shares of Revlon stock. I wonder how much they'd be worth now, 50 years later -- accounting for splits I presume since today's quote is far, far less than what I "paid" for them.

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

Doigotta, a little off subject, but if you had purchased $1,000 in Apple stock just 10 years ago it would now be worth more than $37,000. That same $1,000 invested in Microsoft on the same day would be worth about $1,090. Quite a difference!

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

Will Paul Simon be writing a hit song about jpegs in the near future? Sure will be hard as hell to rhyme....

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

So, Sound Policy, you're saying it's possible there were no splits and I lost my shirt on the Revlon stock, huh? Sounds about right for me . . .

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

Working as a stringer photographer paid for my college, and I loved the occasions where I could shoot in Kodachrome. Hated not being able to have it processed in Arkansas though, so most of my color work was with Ektachrome, which I could process myself. But the Ektachromes never reproduced tomes the way that Kodachrome would.

I hated that KR was limited to ASA 25 and 64, so low-light was out of the question. In the 1980s, Kodak released a ASA 200 version of Kodachrome. I shot a lot of rolls of it then... out of college with new kids... but the 200 seemed to be muted to me.

Just to brag, the best photo I ever shot with Kodachrome: http://warrengallery.com/photography/peopl… It was shot in LR back in the summer of 1982... sometimes it pays to be Catholic and willing to be a photog's assistant for free!

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

(Yes, it's a slow work day...)

When I think back on all the crap I shot in college
It's a wonder I can take a photo at all.
And my once "high end" Nikons are now obsolete
I can read the writing on the wall.

Kodachrome
It gave us those nice bright colors
It gave us the greens of summers
Made us think all the world's a sunny day, Oh yeah
But the cheap digital cameras
Came along with Photoshop
And together they ran my Kodachrome away.

If you took all the girls I once took shot topless
And exhibited the prints for just one night
Today's photogs would shoot something more explicit
(These kids don't know a DAMN about black and white)

Kodachrome
It gave us those nice bright colors
It gave us the greens of summers
Made us think all the world's a sunny day, Oh yeah
But the cheap digital cameras
Came along with Photoshop
And then they ran our Kodachrome away.

Mama there goes my Kodachrome,
Mama there goes my Kodachrome,
Mama there goes my Kodachrome a-waaayy

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

Those must be some mighty cool train pictures.

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

Down in the Silver archives, in the back of the cedar closet in the back of the back room of the basement, are maybe 15,000 slides, the ones we kept, chronological by subject matter, dating back first to Mom's Kodak 314, and then to when Ms Ruth bought me the first Olympus OM-1.

In the early days, we shot Kodachrome, which favors the reds that make life seem so close to the surface, but we eventually switched to Ektachrome, despite the blue shift, since the ASA 400 was so much better for shooting landscapes off the back of a moving bike.

For years, the photo department of the local WalMart remembered Ms Ruth as the weird lady who came back from our two-week trip to the Grand Canyon on the old blue BMW R80RT with 67 rolls of 36-exposure Ektachrome. By then, we had discovered auto-focus.

We eventually traded the whole OM-1 kit, bodies, motor drive, Series 1 zooms, hard-wired Vivitar flash that could be used for spot-welding, to the neat old camera-repair guy up in Springfield for a couple of extra slide projectors.

The slides are slowly being burned to digital images, and I'm not sure if the projectors still work, projector bulbs being what they are.

Anyone who doesn't think we have lost something doesn't understand the importance of touching things with your fingers to reach back where the memories are stored.

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

Silverback: "Anyone who doesn't think we have lost something doesn't understand the importance of touching things with your fingers to reach back where the memories are stored."

Add my heartfelt agreement here. I bought a Nikon Coolscan film/negative scanner a few years ago, and I'm SLOWLY going through my slides and negatives, scanning them for my children. The day before Christmas Eve, I found a box of Kodachrome slides that I had shot in 1975... I was 11, and in the images, my (deceased) father was 40 (younger than I am now.)

I scanned the images, then printed off a couple of the best as 4x6s for my mother. At her house on Christmas, I gave her the pictures... she choked up with emotion and through her tears she spoke of how young Dad was then... my children were choked up too... they only remember their grandfather as an old man, they never saw him in his prime.

Even though the slides were 35 years old, they had been stored in a cool, dry, dark place and the colors were still bright and vivid. With the world moving to all digital, will the JPEG, TIFF and RAW/NEF formats survive 35 years? Will my children be able to find the hidden treasure of a photo of me "when I was young" and show it to their kids someday?

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

I've watched with some sadness over the last 23 years as a professional photographer, and before that as a student learning the intricacies of film processing and printing, as some of my favorite films and papers and processing chemicals have disappeared off the shelves of my local camera shop.
Kodachrome was always considered to be the king of the chromes, though Ektachrome was cheaper and easier to get processed.
A lifetime ago when I was working as a photo assistant at a commercial photo studio where most of the film we shot was 4inch by 5 inch sheet film, when we really wanted to get some punchy color and deep shadow detail for a large print, It was Kodachrome all the way.

My boss at the time used to joke that one day in the near future guys like us using large format sheet film cameras would be performing our trade at silver dollar city for the tourists so they could see how the old timers did it way back when. he wasn't far off.

When they come for my Tri-X........It'll have my tears all over it.

(P.S. love that Paul Simon song, though a guitar playing friend of mine in St.Louis has long insisted that "Kodachrome" was a metaphor for Acid in that song........who knows.)

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

Kodak complained for years about Fuji’s illegal dumping.
So much for the law.

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/11/business…


“If my film makes one more person miserable, I've done my job.”
Woody Allen

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

Question for one of you photo folks. I have a ton of old two and a quarter square B&W negatives I would like to convert to digital. I know this can be done fairly easily with 35mm, but how about 2 1/4?

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

Olefish - yes - it's no problem having 2 1/4 scanned to digital - I had a bunch of it scanned by allied photo in st.Louis. They did a wonderful job by the way.

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

Olefish, if you use an outside company to scan your images, I would strongly suggest you have them scan as TIF instead of JPEG. JPEG compresses and loses detail. If in a few years you (or kids) decide to edit the images, each successive save wipes out more detail.

When I scan mine, I scan as TIF, then copy the TIF to a new file for editing. I save the final as JPEG.

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

Brother Slingerland, the question is not just whether the children can find the images, it is whether they will understand why they should care.

As keepers of the images, we are keepers of the family history, thousand words apiece. Before they are old farts like us, it's hard, moreso in the age when thoughts are no more complicated than can be typed with thumbs, to make the young understand why they should look back.

This one-time avatar is my favorite in the Silver archive. It was shot on Ektachrome with my OM-1 rig by my friend Cyclops (another biker reference), in the side yard of Ruth's parent's farmhouse on a hill just south of the Missouri, before a blazing hot sunset the first Sunday of August, 1979. Just after this moment, Ruth became Ms Silver, although it would take me years to turn color. The next day, we moved to Arkansas and started a new life, which still continues.

I read somewhere that the normal human brain never loses a memory. What we lose is access, like a computer file that has been deleted but only no longer has an address. Photos are the keys that unlock the doors to memory, and every time I see this one it's like my brain has shifted into hyper-space, backwards in time.

Except for the smell of the blue spruce, then just out of the photo to the right, and now three times the size. I cannot quite remember the smell of the blue spruce that afternoon unless I am standing next to it, and the temperature is 96 degrees. Smells are stored elsewhere in the brain, but we know them precisely when we smell them.

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

Worked part of my way through college in the 70/80's selling cameras. Loved my kodachrome. I had quite a reputation as a pretty good large scale artist for sketches, my secret was to tape large paper to a wall and project my slides then just trace them. People said I had a knack for getting the scale and depth of big landscapes. Don't tell anyone.

I had a carosel projector that fried out on me a couple years back but knowing slides were over I nabbed an ancient little single feed projector. Hell I had quit taking slides years before anyway and rarely even looked at my slides any more. Well my wife "surprises" me on my birthday with one of the last models of carousel projectors. The thing was a couple hundred bucks and bulbs are 30 bucks each and those are getting rare too.

I you see my wife, don't tell her. If you do I'll call you a liar.

My last memory lane camera deal a little unrelated though was years back Target used to have a next day or it's free for prints deal. But you had to try to pick up the next day to qualify. If they were a couple days late but got there before you came back in you never knew and they weren't going to tell you.

I knew that after holidays the volume would clog them up and bunches would be late. We took a trip through the Grand Canyon, Arches National Park, Painted Desert and Moab. I had 18 rolls of film to develope. I held off till the day after Easter to take my rolls in plus I ordered large 4x6's and double prints and was waiting there with my claim tickets when the courrier came the next day.

The little girl in the camera department was supposed to mark the log book to show if a customer had come in and the prints were late. When she saw the 18 rolls at $12 each she called the manager.

I told the manager I had a viewing party for family and friends that night and I had always seen that they guarranteed next day prints. Now I am going to have to reschedule for another day, could he call and see if some how I could still get them. He said give him till the end of the day to try. He was hoping like heck he could somehow get them in time. I was hoping like heck he couldn't. Couldn't won the day! Hell I didn't have the money to have picked them all up anyway if they had arrived on time.

Don't tell anybody about this either or I'll call you liar also.

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

I think the fellow who got all his film processed today was a genius and what he obtained was worth every penny he paid. He now has an enduring medium for his life's work in photography. He didn't "mean to" get them processed - he did.

Those of you who are now scanning negs, transparencies and photos to digitize them are probably helping to extend the survival of your images, but keep the originals, too! They may outlast the (ever changing, soon-to-be-obsolete) digital media we now depend upon. You're also getting a good idea of what a tedious task it is to digitize everything. I agree with most of the folks above who recommend "send them to service bureau" to get them all done at one time. You may burn out at your task before digitizing all of your own family photos.

The best gift you can give your children is the habit of printing their digital images. Do it for them, foot the bill if necessary! The prints will last and at this time, costs are very very low.

In my working life, when we encounter a client who has 1,000 images on a compact flash card, we take the time and donate the buck to back up their images on a dvd or cd to return with the camera card. Lots of people don't understand the risk they're taking with a year's worth of photos. We write on the dvd "PRINT THIS STUFF NOW!"

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

The soul truth about pictures is that no human much cares to look at a picture if he is not in it.

Last try.

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

A question for you knowledgeable photography buffs. I have old 8 mm movie films shot by my mother and others, including me, when the kids were young. That "Allied in St Louis" do conversions to DVDs? Anyone closer? We are talking about 8 mm that is 40-50 years old and has NOT been stored under controlled conditions.

Thanks.

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

CBB--
Bedford Camera does conversions of old 8mm film. They put all my dad's film from the 50s on CD for me about two years ago.

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

"It reminds me of one of my many blue-chip stock purchases. Eastman Kodak. How could I lose? "

Gosh, Max. Is that the same as .........spending money on the Lottery in hopes of striking it rich? Surely not........

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

CBB: Check this URL:
http://www.thephotofinishers.com/

If that's closer than Bedford Camera (where ever that is), maybe that'll help.

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike