Mama, Don’t Take My Kodachrome Away

Not that we couldn’t have seen this coming with the proliferation of digital photography and digital projection, but it’s still worth a moment of silence to mark the end of Kodachrome film, which is no longer made and will no longer be processed after December 30, 2010.

I used Kodachrome (rolls and rolls of it) for color pictures in a high school photography class because it was much less expensive to process than print film and, in general, produced more vibrant color. It was easy enough to have the best slides printed, and most times, they came out better than prints from color negatives. I would eventually move to Ektachrome for reasons I can’t quite remember (wider range of film speeds, maybe?) but I do remember that Kodachrome served me well.

Most people have never used slide film and are probably familiar with the brand primarily through the Paul Simon song that immortalized it.

When I think back
On all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder
I can think at all
And though my lack of education
Hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall

Kodachrome
It gives such nice bright colors
It gives us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah!
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away

If you took all the girls I knew
When I was single
And brought them all together for one night
I know they’d never match
My sweet imagination
And everything looks worse in black and white

Kodachrome
It gives such nice bright colors
It gives us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah!
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away