The End of Kodahcrome is near (PART 2)

[Henry Tenby]

The following email exchange between airline slide photographers is a very interesting read:

Richard et all!

I have to say that I had to do some serious soul-searching when I had to decide whether to stop shooting Kodachrome after 40+ years and change to digital, or hang on to the bitter end scouring the earth for the very last roll! The problem we all have is that this medium is ‘tried and tested’ and has stood the test of time, so we are obviously cautious about the new technology. Kodachrome has been going ‘down hill’ ever since the demise of Kodachrome II in the ‘60s. When this was replaced with KR25, it still wasn’t as good, then we lot that and had to contend with KR64 which was the placement for grainy 64 ASA Kodachrome X (remember that?).

Okay the grain was improved on KR64 but it still isn’t as good as it was and some have jumped ship to Fuji Provia, but I’ve tried it and seen like-for-like results taken at the same time and am not convinced! Kodachrome was regarded by many as ‘the top of the league for natural colour and quality’ and as this was a ‘first generation medium’ ( a positive negative!) you could not get better quality colour, providing you had an equally good quality camera! Digital photography has none of the problems with colour balance and processing variations as the colours are captured by the sensor without this becoming an issue.

Now if you knew what the quality of,say, a Canon 40D, could produce in 1962 and you were stood alongside that RCAF Lancaster, would you shoot it on Kodachrome film or with the digital 40D camera? It’s a bit like saying would you shoot it in b/w because you know b/w film has lasted since the early 1900s, or would you shoot it with the then new Kodacolour print film? During the early 1960s, I went to many air shows and stood beside several aircraft photographers who were shooting off rolls of b/w film, whilst I was using Kodachrome II film and carefully shooting one or two slides of each subject. Today, those same people have their b/w negatives to make their inferior second-generation prints, whilst I have all these subjects captured in colour to scan and use how I wish!

How pleased I am today that I had the foresight to embrace technology and look to the future! Now we have the same situation, so we have to look forward and ask yourself what you can do with a slide that you can’t do with a digital image…and I don’t mean hold it in your hand! When digital point-and shoot cameras first came out, I scorned them with their 2 and 3 Megal pixel sensors making anything larger than a postcard pixelate! Now we have DSLRs with 10 and 12 megapixels, giving you the finest quality image blown up to billboard size, so it would be churlish to chase that last roll of KR64 just because that’s what we have done for 40 years!!

Re the book “The Hawker Hunter in British Military Service”, all my shots in that book are scans of original KII slides. You will also note that even the cover photo on this book is mine!! I am so pleased that technology(sorry if I keep using that word!) has enabled me to scan rare slides and e.mail them to publishers, as It means I can publish so much more without fear of losing or having original slides damaged. Latest published shots are in the book “RAF Little Rissington”, in Alan Hall’s WARPAINT book on the Hastings and in the Aviation Workshop’s monographs on the Canberra and Mirage F.1…there are lots more of my photos in the process of being published right now!

I have lost too many rare slides to publishers in the past – Ian Allan lost a slide they published of the Concorde prototype flying at Farnborough in 72, in full sun with an ink-black stormy sky behind! Two people blamed eachother for its loss! Others have been returned scratched, finger-printed and worst of all, soaked in oil!! I know Dick Ward lost all his Scimitar slides to Aerospace Publishing! I know others who submitted their slides to them actually had to go to their offices and refused to leave without them, following which they were directed to a huge box where they were dumped!!! Just wonderful that a group of us can scan very rare slides and share them – slide trading was never THIS good!!

I did go through a transitional period last year where I was still shooting KR64 in my Nikon F801 and digital with my Nikon D70S, but completed ‘the conversion course’ and finished my last roll of ‘wet’ film, never to look back! No more running out of film at air shows, no more frugally deciding on what to use that last shot (999 shots on a 1 GB memory card….even enough for me!), no more processing charges, no more waiting for those films to come back only to be disappointed by quality of the shot or the processing…..you can shoot in low light where Kodachrome would fail miserably! No more storage problems - oh but I do recommend you buy a separate hard-drive for your shots, so if your main PC did fail, everything would be saved.

See you at the next digital CD swapmeet?

Adrian




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Adrian and all

Perhaps your line where you say "that nostalgic feeling of actually hold a 2”X2” square of card surrounding a piece of film" is the nearest thing I've seen yet which describes the problem of conversion for me. It's that tangibility thing. I've been using Kodachrome for almost as long as you did and after thousands and thousands of rolls of the stuff, it's not at all easy to give it up; yes, I'm addicted. As Martin says, it's hard to beat some of the Kodachrome from the earlier period, in fact some of the Sixties stuff is absolutely stunning (the 1962 RCAF Lancaster slide that Rich Hunt obtained comes to mind):

I've recently managed to obtain a book I've been after via eBay for over a year - The Hawker Hunter in British Military Service. Eventually last week I found it. I had an idea it was good, but not that good. And who's photos do I find it features heavily? Yours! I was so impressed I had a look round on the net and found your Air Britain collection. Wow. You have had some extraordinary air-to-air opportunities.

Anyway, back to the point - I even showed my wife some of the early colour in the Hunter book and she could see how high the quality actually was, even as a non-enthusiast. The Kodachrome in those days seemed to capture such natural though vibrant colour and she commented on that point. I was saying how the environmental considerations meant that Kodak had to take more and more of the 'chrome' out of their film (silver, in fact) which contributed to the reduction in richness from the Sixties onwards.

So, to the comparison with digital again. The youngsters who've known no different produce some remarkable results and I think most of the concerns about manipulation can be forgotten - that is within the control of the person that captured the image (no, I didn't say 'took the photograph' - perhaps we should reserve that term for when we used to do it properly in the 'wet' age). If like me you only collect material you've taken yourself, then no problem at all, and I certainly wouldn't resort to cloning objects out, except for perhaps the occasional edge of frame intrusion by say a small piece of branch in an otherwise clear sky surrounding a flying subject. Maybe in the back of our minds there is also the thought that digital makes it all too easy. Although I'm a 100% died-in-the-wool Kodachrome kind of guy,

I'm not one of those that believes that you can actually produce a better image from a scanned slide - I now have a good deal of scanning experience and have never found I can quite rival the tonal balance and somehow the in-your-face immediacy of an equivalent digital shot. I've made lots of side-by-side comparisons and it seems to me that digi wins every time. But here we get into the depths of what the brain perceives on screen. In pure technical terms, we have to accept that a well-taken transparency still holds far more information than a 10Mp digi file. As you say, it is remarkable what can be done with Photoshop skill to correct the inadequacies of imperfect old slides, and I've had great fun enhancing some of my Seventies stuff for Airliners.net.

As far as the digi future is concerned, I will be interested to see how the new Nikon D300 stacks up to the Canon opposition. That's been the other problem with digi for me. I'm pure Nikon and don't want to have a whole set of separate lenses for a DSLR, but have to accept that to date, the Canons have almost always had the edge. For me, the rendition of colour, particularly skies, is much more pleasing on the Canons.

Nikon are changing from CCD to CMOS sensor with this one, so for the first time they'll be using the same imaging method as Canon. I await with interest as a current D80 and ex D70 & D50 user. Whatever the future holds, I know that it's only a matter of time before Mr K pulls the plug and I'll have to get that old KIM used up pretty pronto. Fuji? Yes, superior in many ways but not for me. I have to admit I look forward to being able to capture more of those awesome action shots that we see so much of on the net, so maybe it's better sooner rather than later.

I took this one a few days ago on the way home from the office (Jet B773). Perhaps I should call it Sunset over Kodachrome?

Cheers

Richard