We've lamented more than once on this blog the discontinuation of Kodachrome slide film. To many photography lovers, the end of Kodachrome marked the end of a colorful era and a beloved symbol of analog photography's glory days.
If you had the opportunity of shooting the very last roll of Kodachrome film produced, as National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry did last June, what would you shoot? Well, the results of McCurry's roll are out and you can see them by clicking onto Vanity Fair's slide show called "The Last Roll of Kodachrome—Frame by Frame!" Here's the link: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/02/last-kodachrome-slide-show-201102#intro
Vanity Fair asked " What, pray tell, will McCurry miss most about his old trusty chrome? (He just happens to have shot, at last count, 800,000 Kodachrome frames over the past four decades.) “I’ve been shooting digital for years,” he insists, “but I don’t think you can make a better photograph under certain conditions than you can with Kodachrome. If you have good light and you’re at a fairly high shutter speed, it’s going to be a brilliant color photograph. It had a great color palette. It wasn’t too garish. Some films are like you’re on a drug or something. Velvia made everything so saturated and wildly over-the-top, too electric. Kodachrome had more poetry in it, a softness, an elegance. With digital photography, you gain many benefits [but] you have to put in post-production. [With Kodachrome,] you take it out of the box and the pictures are already brilliant.”
Brilliant, indeed. Thanks, Kodachrome...
FYI, our friends at the The Photography Club of Lower Fairfield County will host an evening with photographer Dan Burns, best known for his photography for the NFL and the New York Giants but with extentive work in a number of diffrent photographic fields. His talk is called "Capturing The World In Motion" and will take place on Wednesday, February 16th at the Stamford Goverment Center's Franklin Auditorium. It'll start at 7:30PM & free to the general public. For more information, you can visit www.pclfc.com . Also, don't forget our Digital DSLR Basics Class on Thursday, February 17th at 7PM.