"Mama don't take my Kodachrome"

Kodak is ending production of Kodachrome. The film now joins the ranks of the Daguerreotype, Albumen, Kallitype, Palladiotype, Ozobrome, Artigue,  Autochrome, Bromoil, and Polaroid.

It's as though a relative that I haven't seen in decades has passed away. Us older photographers cut our teeth on Kodachrome—in the 60s and 70s it was really the only viable choice for color photography, and we learned to expose within its limited dynamic range. There was nothing like that dense black of a Kodachrome shadow—any other chrome film of the era showed a color-tinted miasma of golf-ball grain in the dark areas. Yet I probably exposed my last roll of Kodachrome around 1992.

The shot above is on 4x5 Kodachrome film that my father used in the Navy. That's him, in 1944, about to head out on an aerial shoot.

Here is Kodak's announcement, and the lyrics to the Paul Simon song.