With all the free publicity for railfan photography brought about by the many articles about the end of Kodachrome, reporters just seemed to be unable to avoid a slack jawed reaction to the news about railroad worker Jim DeMike – the guy who showed up at Dwayne’s Photo to pick up 1,580 rolls of slides, all train shots, and forked over nearly $16,000.
I hope someone, ideally Trains but if not, Railroad & Railfan would do, is talking to this guy about a “best of” selection article or fature from those final rolls. He has become a national symbol of our hobby and our obsession. And in some small way it would be nice to defray the cost of the processing, even if just a little bit.
Agreed. [tup] I missed that one. [(-D] He’ll be the ‘poster child’ for our hobby now ! Just hope he remembered to take the lens cap off and turn on the exposure meter . . . [:-^]
So what are they of ? Even if accumulated over - say, 30 years, that’s like 50+ rolls a year - better than 1 a week, or 24 - 36 exposures a week, or 3 - 7 pix a day. Roster shots of locos ? Lots of Cars ? Pretty scenery ? Co-workers ? Whatever struck his fancy ?
[:-,] But "I pity the fool . . " - that’s like 37,000 to 55,000 or so slides to sort and calalog and store - then again, maybe that’ll give him something to do over the rest of this long and cold winter . . . [:-^]
Assuming all of the rolls were 24 exposure, that is 37,920 slides. It must have taken several years to take that many pictures (he would have to take nearly 104 pictures per day to take that many in one year). I wonder why he waited so long?
The story says that he borrowed the money from his father’s retirement account to get all the slides developed before they stopped processing Kodachrome. The amount was over $15k. He is a big time slide trader, originals only.