The Death of Kodachrome: Does it still matter?

Kodak announced this week they have stopped making Kodachrome--probably the most well-known film of all time. This has caused no end of commentary but the truth is that of course it ceased to matter to most of us a long time ago.

Accompanying this story is a photo of my remaining 3 rolls of carefully frozen Kodachrome 64, which live in the freezer next to my Kodachrome 25. Most of it has long since been given away to schools since I made the transition to digital in 2000. What's interesting is that I shot that picture with a 12 Megapixel $300 digital camera at ISO 400 that can emulate half a dozen different film looks, features a sensor which can optimize for Dynamic Range or for Resolution, can auto-adjust for White Balance (remember Daylight & Tungsten film) and can hold hundreds if not thousands of images on an SD card the size of my thumbnail (in this case the Fujifilm Finepix F200EXR, but similar points could be made about other cameras).

It's incredible how far we have come in the last 20 years (you can argue the specific timing, but it was probably about 20 years ago that Kodachrome ceased to be the sweetspot for many film shooters and was replaced by newer formulations). That doesn't mean that we have completely eclipsed the "look" of Kodachrome (or Velvia or Provia or any other of your favorite films) but it does mean that we have dozens of times more options at our disposal for creating great images. And that doesn't even include the advent of Auto-Focus! Kodachrome is dead, long live photography.--David