The passing of Kodachrome

I can't tell you the last time I took a picture using color film, namely the Kodachrome film from Kodak. It's been too long and now Eastman Kodak has announced it'll stop making Kodachrome.

Like many people, I've gone digital. Every picture I take is made up of electronic ones and twos and bits and bytes.

The photos, and there are hundreds of them now, don't exist as something I can hold in my hand. They exist as files that I keep on the hard drive of my laptop or the back-up drive on my desk or, occasionally, on the teeny tiny digital card in my BlackBerry.

But though I abandoned Kodachrome long ago, I mourn its passing ... am partly to blame, in fact, for its passing.

I guess I'm at that age when something that was so iconic or important in my life no longer ceases to be, I get a little misty-eyed and nostalgic, especially when that something was an important part of my life in various parts of my life.

Such is the case with Kodachrome film.

I was a newspaper journalist/photojournalist for many years. Taking pictures was as much a part of my job as reporting and writing for the small newspapers where I worked.

When I wasn't shooting the black and white Tri-X film from Kodak for the newspaper I was shooting the Kodachrome color film or slides for myself.

It was the slide film that I shot in 1977 during a two-month cross-country car trip, capturing the images you might expect: from the Grand Canyon to Yellowstone, from Mesa Verde to Las Vegas, from the Great Smokey Mountains to Gettysburg, from Salt Lake City to Seattle, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and the Mississippi, Ohio, Colorado and Snake rivers in between.

(Picture above at Arches National Park in Utah was taken with Kodachrome slide film.)

It was the Kodachrome I used to capture the births and childhoods of my children, Elizabeth and David.

Kodachrome captured the images of my first wedding.

Digital captured the images of my second and all the important family events and everything else since the late 1990s. Kodachrome truly represented a former life that I have moved on from.

In part I mourn the passing of Kodachrome because I miss what film forced us to do. It made us get prints and having the prints guilted us into getting the pictures into an album.

I tell myself that someday I will organize my digital photos, print the most important ones and get them into albums. But I lie to myself. I probably never will because, at this stage, the project would be far too vast.

Ironically, it's my 22-year-old son David who will uphold, at least for a time, the film tradition. He is on a cross-country trip of his own, using the same Minolta I had in 1977, and he's shooting of all things Kodak black and white film. Talk about retro.

Now, there's an album I can't wait to see.