It feels like sacrilege,
but I am in the process of binning large numbers of Kodachromes.
In the days of colour
film, Kodachrome was the gold standard. It's what the National
Geographic photographers used, despite its now unthinkably slow speed
(64 ASA, unless you were a masochist and went for the 25). It had
other drawbacks: it had to be sent back to Kodak for processing, so
couldn't be used on jobs that required a fast turnaround, and, to get
the best out of it, accurate exposure was essential. But, correctly
exposed, it produced transparencies with great colour, contrast and sharpness,
and reputedly better archival stability than any other film. I used
it on virtually all my foreign trips through the 1980s and 1990s.
It was only when picture
desks started going digital, and image distribution switched from
Royal Mail or motorcycle courier to FTP and email, that
another disadvantage was revealed: Kodachrome's unique emulsion
structure made it quite tricky to scan. Getting the colour and
contrast right was not straightforward, and Digital ICE automated
dust-removal, which worked well on other colour film stocks, could
not be used. That meant dust and scratches had to be removed by hand
in Photoshop. Scanning Kodachromes was hard work.
However, that's not why
they're in the bin. Distributing images shot on colour transparency
film to multiple publications meant shooting multiple frames, or making duplicates after the
event. After each trip one set went
into my own filing cabinet, and selections of 'similars' went off to
the various picture libraries that also distributed my work. Over the last few years they have all come back, like long lost homing pigeons:
many agencies have closed, and those that haven't no longer deal
in hard copies.
Once an image has been
digitised, identical copies can be made effortlessly, with no loss in
quality. There's no need for 'seconds' or spares. So, although I
can't bring myself to throw away the original of anything worth
scanning, I've finally got round to trawling through the stacks of
returned suspension files, comparing 'similars', keeping the best,
and dumping the rest. What I'm doing is completely logical - it
just feels like an unforgivable sin.
Pictured above is
a binful of hundreds of slides from two trips to the Dominican
Republic, for Christian Aid in 1983, and Oxfam in 1991. Scans of
some of those I've kept are here.
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| Dominican Republic 1991 |
