The last Kodachrome

jtbell

The last roll of Kodachrome slide film emerged from the processor at Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas, at 1:36 PM Central Time on January 18, 2011. It was shot by Dwayne Steinle, the company's owner, and the last frame is a group portrait of the company's employees, wearing T-shirts to commemorate the occasion. I haven't found this picture on the Web yet, but it appears in the April 2011 issue of Railfan & Railroad magazine, which I received in the mail today.

Dwayne's had stopped accepting Kodachrome for processing on December 31, but so much film was sent in during December (30,000 rolls of 35mm film, 4,000 rolls of Super 8 movie film, and 60,000 feet of 16mm movie film) that it took nearly three weeks to process the backlog.

None of my pictures were in that backlog. I shot my last roll of film about eight years ago.

lisab

I hope the t-shirts were colorful.

Integral

Wow, I to loved Kodachromes rich greens, even at 25 ASA. I gave in to high speed Ektachrome (160ASA?) when I was diving in Cuba, I really needed the speed unfortunately Ektachrome seemed to enhance blues, underwater was already blue rich, oh well. You do what you have to.

I didn't plan on going back to slides real soon any way, guess it is definite now.

jtbell

You can order one from Dwayne's while they're still available.

I think the last time I used Kodachrome (or slide film in general) was around 1995. After that I switched to negative film because it was so much more convenient to pass around prints than to haul out the slide projector. Then when I started scanning pictures for my Web site, I discovered that it's a lot easier to get good scans from negatives than from slides, provided your scanning software can do the color-inversion step properly.