The Daily Parker

The last Kodachrome processing machine is gone:

In the last weeks, dozens of visitors and thousands of overnight packages have raced [to Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas], 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 end, it was determined that a roll belonging to Dwayne Steinle, the owner, would be last. It took three tries to find a camera that worked. And over the course of the week he fired off shots of his house, his family and downtown Parsons. The last frame is already planned for Thursday, a picture of all the employees standing in front of Dwayne’s wearing shirts with the epitaph: "The best slide and movie film in history is now officially retired. Kodachrome: 1935-2010."

I used the film for close to 90% of my color work from 1983 to 2000, when I took my last Kodachrome photo at Lake Sacandaga, N.Y. Red always made the most striking Kodachrome slides; I don't know if a scanner exists that can duplicate it:

Boston Public Garden, 10 May 1986

But wow, was that film hard to use. It had an exposure latitude of about 1 stop, meaning you had to hit the exposure dead on to get a usable shot. A slight underexposure bias seemed to yield richer colors, so I always set my meter down a third of a stop (to ASA 80 when using Kodachrome 64, for example). And it was slow, so slow; until Kodachrome 200 came down in price in 1986, I used 64 (or even 25) most of the time. As side effect, it forced wider apertures to use reasonable shutter speeds in anything but bright sunlight. And at about 60c per shot (including developing), it led to more considered shooting. I probably wouldn't have gotten this using a digital camera or a faster film, for example:

Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, Burlington, Vt., 26 September 1992

I miss Kodachrome, but not enough to keep shooting with it. I just hope the dyes last for another 50 years or so, and that sometime before they fade too much I find a scanner that can capture their true colors.

Rolle, Switzerland, 17 June 1992

The slide scanning project is almost done. I'm right now scanning the end of 1998, right around when I switched to digital cameras. Here are three from the mid-1990s showing bits of Chicago that no longer exist.

First, in this view from the Sears Tower from April 1993, you can see Meigs Field and Soldier Field, both since destroyed:

This April 1995 photo shows the view from the Michigan Avenue Bridge that now would encompass Trump Tower:

The sun, however, still rises above Lake Michigan:

Autumn in the Green Mountain State:

Cornwall, Vt., 17 October 1992. Same here:

Just up the road in Whiting, same day:

And up in Weybridge, 1 November 1992:

During the few months I lived in Vermont, Bill Clinton got elected President. He spoke at one big rally that year, up in Burlington, and thanks to a press pass from a friend at a radio station, I got to see him in person:

I think you can see the Secret Service agent pushing me away in this shot, though Clinton himself couldn't get enough of the rope line:

Then-Vermont-governor Howard Dean was there too:

Few people knew before, you know, this blog entry, that I lived in Vermont for a few months in 1992. (I was young, I needed the work.) Actually, it was the most beautiful place I've lived. That said, I grew up in one big city and went to college in another, so the things that made Vermont beautiful were precisely those things that made it difficult for me to live there: wide open spaces, trees, idyllic rural living, etc.

I moved back to Chicago in short order, but not after taking a few hundred photos. These, for example, I took in Middlebury, where I lived at the time:

The first two are from July 1992; the last one, from September, in southern Vermont, near where my friend Renee lived at the time.

I went back to Middlebury in May 2006. It looked almost exactly the same, except I had a digital camera with me instead of one that took expensive slides. Unfortunately it was rainy and gray in 2006, so these photos from 1992 turned out much better.

More photos from 1992. Taking the Kyle of Lochalsh train from Inverness through the Scottish highlands capped the trip. I took three rolls of film in as many hours. (We didn't have digital cameras back then, so each photo, with processing, cost about 35c—the equivalent of about 70c today—so those three rolls represent about $75 of today's dollars.)

Here are three of those shots, from 24 June 1992:

Note, please, that I have licensed some of my work as stock photos, and I would like to do so again. So even though generally this blog is licensed as a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States work, photographs are not, and have never been, CC-licensed. Only the text is covered by the CC license. Photos are, and always have been, Copyright © David Braverman, all rights reserved, from the point of creation.

The trip I took in 1992 went from West Sussex, England, to Nice, France; Genève, Switzerland; Strasbourg, France; then back to the U.K. As I continue the (excruciatingly slow) process of scanning all these slides, I'll continue to post the better ones. Like these, the first from Nice:

And Strasbourg:

Like many Americans, I backpacked through Europe right after graduating from college, in the summer of 1992. I've been scanning all of my slides, gradually, for a couple of years in fact, and I'm now up to that Europe trip. (The trip starts on slide #2362, and I'm just today up to slide #2500.)

Here are two. First, Chichester Cathedral, England:

Then, from Rolle, Switzerland:

I'm glad I took slides—almost all of them on Kodachrome 64. Some of the earliest photos still have perfect color and grain, 27 years later. I hope they all last another century. If not, at least I've got a huge chunk of them scanned. Then there are the 180 rolls of negatives...but that project is a long way off.

I'm still scanning all my old photos, now up to slide #964 of 3,828 (not including the 176 rolls of negatives). In addition to the embarrassing photos of me as a gangly teenager, and embarrassing photos of my family (complete with 1980s hair and clothes), I've also found some of general interest, like these two of New York in July 1984:

In the bottom picture you can just make out that the Statue of Liberty is covered in a scaffold. This was during the centennial renovation project that ended with the statue's re-opening to the public on 4 July 1986. Also, you can see the World Financial Center under construction just to the right (West) of the World Trade Center.

Reggie (below) gets to walk on or near a beach almost every day. Today I got to tag along.

Here's the actual walk:

For some reason, on this trip I've taken a lot of photos—782 so far this weekend. Digital photography is wonderful like that. Plus, had I only 36 shots per roll at a cost of about 33c per photo, I might not do a lot of experimenting. On the other hand, I might have a higher proportion of good shots. On the third hand (?), the shots I've posted this weekend are only the highlights, as my "hit" rate is somewhat better than 2%.