Friday, July 3, 2009

Into the sunset

Further to the demise of Kodachrome, the WSJ waxes elegiac about everything that made this slide film such a sensuous medium.

As I was putting away the not-so-critical stuff (meaning: you don’t need it to eat or sleep), I came upon my bag o’ film, which includes two 36-exposure rolls of Kodachrome 64, a roll of TMAX 100 and one of TMAX 3200 black & white, and a mass of Fujicolor color negative film. That stopped me in my tracks—even more than finding the lead pouch I used to put this stuff in to go through airport checked luggage X-raying.

What a blast from the past. Makes me think about all the years of photographs I’ve taken (my theory was that—especially with slide film—I’d just shoot everything that appealed to me, and then pick out the few keepers from each roll; it worked out pretty well, generally), all the places I’ve hauled all those cameras. It’s like my life is wrapped up in that more than in anything else.

And I wonder why I seemed to have no trouble learning to shoot with the Nikon rangefinder, with having to read the external light meter and calculate the f-stop & shutter speed; or the various Minolta SLRs I went through; but this bloody Nikon DSLR just makes me want to drop-kick it across the Puget Sound?

Well—death, change and taxes are the only constants, I guess.

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