For you photogs...found this in one of my racing sites today:
Slide film belongs to a different era—when many American families had a slide projector in the attic, or when the motorcycle industry had five major monthly motorcycle magazines that primarily used that format for publication. Or, when racetrack press rooms had an adjacent darkroom.
It's a sign of generational change that most people....certainly whoever wrote that article...have no idea about why Kodachrome was so special. 30 years ago, any photographer worth his salt understood Kodachrome. But it's not 30 years ago.
Kodachrome was a film literally like no other. Because the dyes weren't incorporated into the raw emulsion, Kodachrome film was very thin. That made it especially sharp because the light would not disperse through the thin film like it did with other film. It yielded spectacular prints...I mean truly spectacular prints. Most photographers who shot Kodachrome didn't own slide projectors. For us, it was a transparency film used for making prints. I shot a lot of 120 size medium format Kodachrome when it came available in the mid 1980's. Those transparencies remain on strips and yielded several prints. They aren't for projection.
The statement about "when racetrack press rooms had an adjacent darkroom" is the most telling sign that the author is either too young to remember Kodachrome or never understood it. You couldn't process Kodachrome in a small time darkroom. Kodachrome processing was complicated. When I was shooting 120 Kodachrome in the 80's, I had to mail the unprocessed film to Rochester, New York...the only place on the continent that could process it. And it came back about two weeks later. Even when shooting 35mm, there were only a couple of labs in Canada that could process it. The articles author is using the word "Kodachrome" to refer to a generic slide film like the more common Ektachromes, Fujichromes or Agfachromes which all used simple processes that could be done in a home darkroom.
But, it's all academic now. I'm a 100% convert to digital and I love it. With Kodachrome gone, there is really no good reason to shoot film anyway. Like I say, it's a sign of the passing of time and generations that there are people who have no understanding of Kodachrome.
