That last roll of Kodachrome ever
 

Last Kodachrome roll processed in Parsons | Business News for Wichita Kansas | Local Journal of Wichita Business News and Kansas Business News | Wichita Eagle

Another victim of digital photography.

Sad day. As Paul Simon said, the greens of summer. Some colors, captured on Kodachrome, are STUNNING.

Yep, and in 100 years it will still look good. How are we ever going to store all the digital photos for long term?

Well, 10,000 digital photos are MUCH easier to store than 10,000 prints.

pretty sure kodachrome is slide film

Boo hoo. Such a sad day. Almost as sad as when the last steam engine was made. Or the last telegraph, or the last slide rule.....

Oh where, oh where will we store all those digital images??


http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1280176893.jpg


http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1280176913.jpg

I'm with the Viking. Who cares, it's day is over- turn the page.

It is. I have a ton of 35mm slides I've shot over the years - and good old fashioned 35mm prints too.

I know digital photography has come a long way and all, but it just doesn't strike me as particularly valuable. With conventional film photography, each shot HAS to count. You can't just blast away and take a thousand stills and if three of them happen to be good, call yourself a great photographer. Yet that's what the digital medium does - it cheapens the process and dumbs it down. There is no longer "photography", there are "digital snapshots". Yes, these have value in their own way but it's just not the same.

I'll never get rid of my venerable Pentax K1000. Never. I might get a cool fancy-schmancy digital SLR at some point but I bet if I do I still always love the 35mm one more.

You can UNDERSTAND a 35mm. You know how it works. It's comprehensible by the average human being. You can take it apart and fix it. You can't do that with a digital - it's still an enigmatic (and proprietary, usually) black box. No thanks. That's devoid of artistic merit to me. Even if it does yield cool results sometimes.

My $200 sony 12.1 megapixel takes fantastic pix if i do my part. I never even knew how much i liked photography until i got my digital because film was always so freakin' expensive for the old style cameras that i never really got to play around and experiment with what i could do with a camera until i could do it for free.

I take probably 100 pix a week, and it doesn't cost a dime. Now, instead of waiting for that "perfect shot," i can snap away to my heart's content without worrying about "being out of film," should the shot i really want present itself.

I love my digital camera.

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b3...s/6a6d0015.jpg
(So does my model, lol)

Lets see, to properly archive photographic negatives or film, it has to be kept cold (fridge or freezer), dry and dark. Oh yeah, don't touch it either as scratches are irreversible. So buy a dessicated freezer, put in the film and never move it again.

To store and backup my digital photos, I go to Costco and buy 1Tb drives for $100. Use one, have another as a backup that I rotate with one stored offsite.

If you are willing to learn new things, you can understand how a CMOS image sensor works:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_sensor

Digital cameras have their place, and it makes sense that they are FAR more popular than film cameras, and getting more popular all the time.

But......film cameras DO something to the film. The way the image will be laid on the film, the depth of field, the shadows, the way the light will play out. Digital cameras can approximate that, if the processor knows what he's doing. But there is something that film cameras do that digital cameras don't.

Here's a better one:

ShortCourses-Image Sensors—Introduction

Yes. Deteriorate over time.

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b3...dCSKatana3.jpg
Took this one with my digicam, to me it looks magnificent.

Film looks better. to me. I dont care how many mega pixels, I have the Nikon D5000 which is an awesome digital camera. Film still looks better.

analog is analog and digital is digital. Different workflows, different vibe. The memes of photography came out of analog, and most still hold even though there is no reason for some of them. With larger sensors getting cheaper, you're beginning to see some amazing output but some still choose film.

What is interesting is that we have relatively short lifespans on a number of (analog) technologies. For example film and vinyl audio recording. The use of digital for representation has happened incredibly fast. The repercussions of this are just starting to pop up.

This is one of your better pictures. Pretty spectacular IMHO.

Best,
Tom

That is great for short term storage but long term storage is different. No hard drive from today will be readable in 50 years. They will look at a huge hard drive and wonder how something so big could store so little.

Try to plug in and read a MFM format hard drive from just 15 years ago. If it even works the data format will not work on a modern computer. You will need to keep one of the old style computers with DOS on it to make it read.

I work with images that average one gig each. Try to backup a few terabytes of data. It will take days to copy.

Digital is here to stay, but is will never replace film completely. I can pull a negative from our archives from 1947 and scan it and it looks great. I have no idea how we can keep the petabytes of storage we will need to keep all the current imagery we will make and have it useable in 2147. It will not be my problem.

There is nothing like sitting down with a shoebox full of photos taken 20 years ago.

Sailchef hit it on the head.
Its the experience of finding and sorting to find the "treasures".

not much difference there - I do that going through my digital libraries all the time. Only the "shoebox" is different...

Aren't silver halide grains in a photo emulsion a "digital" technology? In other words, the grain structure of a piece of B&W film under magnification is a bunch of pixels too.

I get your point, though. Some airplane writer long ago made a related point, that analog technologies endure while digital technologies rapidly go obsolete-- for example, look at aircraft magneto ignitions-- haven't changed in 100 years for the most part, but kettering gave way to CDI to breakerless to individual coils to coil-on-plug, and fuel injection went from MFI to CIS to D-Jet to L-Jet to Motronic and on and on and on. . .

Where did I put my wooden shoe?

. . . plus, you might find some nekkid-wimmen pictures that you forgot you downloaded from the inter-web and stashed away.

:)

Fixed!

Old style photos are too easy to lose, or have damaged, and you can only give a pic to one person, one time. Now, in the digital age, if 10 of my friends want a pic, i can give it to all 10, or to a hundred, or a thousand- at no cost to me- and still keep the original for myself.

90% of my army photos are gone because i gave them out to friends (ex) girlfriends or relatives. I'll never see them again. The few i have left are all faded with age, and are low resolution. If i'd had a digicam, i'd still have every one of them today, and they'd look like they did the day i took them.

What's more, with a digicam i can correct flaws, red eye, sharpen blurs, correct poor lighting, etc, etc. And on top of it all, i don't have the continuing expense of film or development costs, nor do i have to deal with the space requirements that carrying a lot of film demands.

In every tangible way, digital cameras are far superior.



PS: Thanks moss guy!

The issue is whether or not in 20 or 50 years you'll actually have access to the photos. While there is hope that jpg will remain (or there will be some translator), there are a lot of multimedia file formats that are already essentially dead and unreadable.

Didn't you keep the negatives?

As end user you will have the opportunity to udpate them over time as new technologies emerge. Whether or not you actually do that, as end user, of course, is another issue entirely.

And for most folks, just one hard drive crash and the old files are GONE in a blink.

We have a Nikon D3 at work. It is the first digital camera I have seen that is actually superior to film. We have images from the Nikon that beat a 2.25 x 2.75 inch negative from a professional camera. (Pentax 6x7 camera)

Digital is here to stay, but film still has a place for long term storage. It will be a long while before all film is gone forever.

The best digital camera in the world....

From here > LEICA vs Canon vs Nikon sharpness

Analysis

With the same money spent on lenses, the Leica easily wins.

The Leica is usually superior, or at least as good, as the best from Nikon and Canon at the same price.

When you also consider that the Leica weighs only a fraction as much as either camera or lens, it's a no-brainer to see which is the best for outdoor photography.

Even then, the Leica shot instantly, while I had to jack with menus to set the Nikon and Canon. Worse, I had to deal with foolish electronic controls to set manual aperture and shutter speeds on the Nikon and Canon, while with the Leica, all I did was turn the dedicated, click-stopped knobs. I shot the Leica in a tenth the time that it took to shoot either the Canon or Nikon.

Overall, the Leica wins because of its great sensor coupled with Leica's superior optics. Canon's 21MP sensor is about as good, but the end results only match if you could get lenses this good for the Canon — which you can't do at most focal lengths.

Even if Nikon' slightly higher-on-paper resolution D3X was relevant here, it would also be limited by Nikon's optics, just like the D700 and D3 as shown above.

The M9 sensor is made in Rochester, New York, USA. GO USA! Buy American!

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1280192314.jpg

I can attest to that. Foolishly relied on on external HD, that was only on when I needed access to the files, Didn't think about when it was on and I accidentally pulled it off the table, seizing the motor bearing. :(

Digital is surpassing film these days. I know a die-hard film guy that bought a digi-SLR, convinced he would stick with his Fuji Velvia, but soon after playing with the DSLR, he dumped his film cameras except for his film pano camera.

From an aging Nikon D100, taken a couple of days ago.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1280192488.jpg

Am i really the only guy that burns my pix to CD's?

No... When I shoot B/W film my processing lab burns the photos to CD/DVD.

So I get the negatives and disk only. No Prints. $20 for 36 exposures.

My Sony cost $200 up front. Battery is rechargeable. It came with a 8gb memory card. I've taken at least a thousand pix with it since i bought it about 8-9 months ago. The pix it is capable of taking speak for themselves.

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b3.../HKP7Geco1.jpg

That money will be among the best $200 i'll ever spend in my life, IMO. The camera has really turned me into a shutterbug.

CDs? If I'm shooting raw with the 5D2 that is about 30 images. Since my library is in the tens of thousands, CD archive isn't really the way to go. I have two different external HDs. If they both crash, I start over. Nothing is forever...

Blue Rays would be the way to go for you, if you wanted to store them to shiny silver disk thingys, i guess. For the vast majority of people, CDs and DVDs offer plenty of storage capacity.

Snipe, which Panasonic do you have?

Thanks,
Tom

Wow, no more Kodachrome :eek: I used to shoot craploads of that stuff. Going to the races, you always had to plan ahead to change rolls between the action. Eventually I carried 2 cameras so one was always ready to go, what a pain! It still amazes me I can now put 1000+ photos on a tiny memory card. I'd never want to go back to film.

From the old Kodachrome 64 'shoebox':

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1280194462.jpg

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1280194821.jpg

Bill

Great photo but I have to ask... Why a BIG site on such a concealable spoon?

It's kind of like vinyl. You could find a library full of old classics, but if you don't have the turn table you can't play the music.

I think a lot of "memories" will be "wiped out" before they ever get the chance to become lost, and then re-discovered by others.

The thing that blows me away about our D3 is the ISO speed available. We can shoot a football game at night from our airplane and just set the camera for 3200. It makes an image with almost no noise. We can go to 6400 and have a miniscule amount of noise. With color film 1600 is pretty much the max if you want to make a 16x20 or bigger and a professional quality photo.

The dynamic range of an image at 3200 is stunning with the D3. Film will have major grain (noise) and very high contrast at 1600. Going to 3200 is a waste of time with film.

Don't expect a CD to last more than 10 years. A CD will be as useless as a 5.25 inch floppy is now in 20 years.