Kodachrome, RIP

Many news outlets reported over the weekend that Dwayne’s Photo Service, the last lab in the country to offer Kodachrome processing, stopped taking processing orders for the iconic film on December 30. We’ve known for more than a year that Kodak was going to discontinue Kodachrome, and there have been a number of great tribute projects around the country in 2010.

While I grew up with Kodachrome and have a soft place in my heart for its warm color tones and sharp detail, I’m personally kind of happy to see slide film go the way of the dinosaurs. Slides are hard to store and handle, processing slide film can be kind of fussy, and scanning transparency film to insert images into print layouts is time consuming and expensive.

Many photographers lament the passing of this great film, but I bet if you asked them when no one was listening, they’d all admit that they much prefer digital.