When Kodak announced in June that they were ending the production of Kodachrome, I must admit I felt a bit sad.   Here I don’t even USE Kodachrome any more!  I’ve been shooting all digital for 6 years.   And yet, I can’t help but feel like I just heard that an old friend whom I knew for many years was now dying.

I fell in love with Kodachrome back in the 70’s, and shot many thousands of frames of Kodachrome 64 35mm slide film.   I loved its rich colors and tight grain.   I was always a bit of a fanatic about rich color and archival qualities.  I would shoot all Kodachrome and then send off my film to Kodak for processing.  Even to this day, I still remember the mailing address of 3131 Manor Way, in Dallas, where I would address the processing mailer.  (Having to write the address over and over again on the mailers permanently programmed my brain.)  And then when I got the slides back, I would go into the darkroom and spend countless hours printing on Cibachrome (a great archival process by Ilford).

I truly feel some sense of “loss” with the end of Kodachome.  I guess in some ways I had learned to see the world through Kodachrome eyes.   It’s hard to even express why, but there is something I still miss about shooting with film, and Kodachrome in particular.

Time moves on.  Goodbye old friend.

Kevin Gourley (http://www.KevinGourley.com)