Hey you rail fans, would you put up over $15,000 to save your train pictures???
Now read this.
PARSONS, Kan. — An unlikely pilgrimage is under way to Dwayne’s Photo, a small family business that has through luck and persistence become the last processor in the world of Kodachrome, the first successful color film and still the most beloved.
That celebrated 75-year run from mainstream to niche photography is scheduled to come to an end on Thursday when the last processing machine is shut down here to be sold for scrap.
In the last weeks, dozens of visitors and thousands of overnight packages have raced here, transforming this small prairie-bound city not far from the Oklahoma border for a brief time into a center of nostalgia for the days when photographs appeared not in the sterile frame of a computer screen or in a pack of flimsy pri
1500 undeveloped rolls? There is a story there in and of itself. I know a guy who through sheer inertia has 100 to 200 undeveloped rolls of Kodachrome, and those include railfan and NMRA events that cannot be duplicated today. He always intended to get to them “some day” – but then the price of Kodachrome slide developing went through the roof and he was laid off and had medical and other expenses. Now he’ll never know what those shots looked like.
I have to wonder how old some of the rolls were and how they were stored. The chemicals in unprocessed film do age, especially if stored at room temperature and above, although I never had any problems with Kodachrome a little beyond its expiry date. The other challenge the gentleman will face is dealing with the massive collection of slides once he gets them back. Probably more than a few where he can no longer remember where or when he took them, and that can sometimes be fairly important if the image is to have any historical value beyond “just another picture of an SD40-2 somewhere in grain country”. Just getting the 1500 boxes into some form of chronological order is going to be difficult enough. But maybe the film will have deteriorated enough that many boxes will not be worth keeping, although now digitizing the image and computer programs can rescue some color shifts.
Good points all, John. My buddy DID try to get a few key rolls developed and found, to his amazement, that even with no special steps at preservation, the undeveloped rolls from even a decade or more earlier still developed quite well. A tribute to the product quality. And he takes meticulous notes when he takes pictures and marked the canisters so it was never a matter of getting back a slide and being befuddled by time or place.
I on the other hand took and still take sketchy notes but tried to get everything developed pronto so that I could rely on a mix of notes and recollections. Sometimes my handwriting is hard to make out if the notes were made in “field” conditions. But even then sometimes I was at a loss to know where I was or why I took a particular shot – particularly a grab shot. Even with today’s digital I need to organize and download the shots quickly – and then I label the CD-Rs as well as their boxes. I try to get to this within days of taking the shots. I have learned my lesson.
Now that I know my slides are a closed-end matter, never to be added to, it is just a matter of finding the time so I can truly organize all of them, once and for all, separating the “so-so” ones, or pure duplicates, for the “back of the drawer” boxes* and putting the outstanding ones into carousels or decks for stack loading. I am very grateful that I have no undeveloped Kodachrome (or Ektachrome for that matter) sitting around. But those final years of Kodachrome were getting awful darn expensive, first the film, then the developing, and more and more the developing was getting botched, or at times slides even being lost forever.
footnote: Funny how my “so-so” slides of the Milwaukee Road, Soo Line, and Chicago & North Western ended up being brought back from the back of the drawer into the carousels and stack loader ready boxes once those became fallen flags