Kodachrome was the Instagram of its time | Hacker News Reader

Kodachrome was the Instagram of its time

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56 pointsTomte38 comments

I feel like, if you wanted to pick the film-photography version of Instagram, a better choice would be Polaroid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaroid_Corporation

Kodachrome was always preferred by serious photographers (at least until the Japanese film companies started muscling their way into the US in the mid-'80s), but Polaroid was the peoples' choice -- cheap, social and fun. People would crowd around a Polaroid exposure taken at a party, watching the image develop and commenting to each other on it. Nobody ever confused it for high quality film, but for the purposes it was put to, that didn't matter.

I agree. Even more directly, Instagram's early icons were pretty clearly inspired by Polaroid, with one of them even a straight up illustration of a specific Polaroid camera.

See the second icon here: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/54bb4cfce4b045585...

It's a Polaroid OneStep with Q-Light: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/bb/16/a4/bb16a4b51206b9fdbc73135c6...

Kodachrome might have arguably been the most NON-instant film you could use.

It was possible to develop Polaroid in a few seconds.

The next easiest was black-and-white film, which you could do in your own home.

It was also possible to do normal color film (like c-41) in your own home (with difficulty), but you could also drop it by a local lab and pick it up the next day (or a few days).

But Kodachrome - that required a tech tree. It had to be sent off to a special facility. There were only a few of them, which required the ability (and certification and chemicals) to develop it.

I only ever shot one roll of it. In 2006 film was well and truly on its way out. I had just graduated college, and was bicycle touring the United States. In or around Yosemite, I picked up a roll at (I believe) a gas station of all places.

Even in 2006, the last place you could get it developed was Dwayne's Photo in Kansas. Kodachrome is a completely different process than any other film. The crazy thing about the film is that the development process actually removes layers of emulsion depending on what color light the film was exposed to. You can actually see this with the naked eye looking at the emulsion side of the film; it looks a little bit like a relief carving.

I'd like to say the results were magical, but honestly, my inexperience with the film meant they looked pretty normal. The color rendering really is different from other emulsions, and getting the most out of it probably requires some practice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodachrome

Man I miss Kodachrome. Of course, I hadn’t shot it in decades. I miss the idea of it more, I guess.

I never shot kodachrome, but did shoot a lot of medium format provia and velvia with a Rolleiflex TLR in 2004-2015.

I made prints from the slides digitally, because direct printing with cibachrome/ilfochrome was virtually unobtainable. Stopped shooting film completely when i got my 1st gen Sony A7R. Somehow the colors out of this camera were as pleasing as a roll of provia, with just a little exposure/contrast adjustment.

+1 on Velvia. Ektachrome was also pretty, especially for landscapes and green eyed people.

And it still is--- it was reintroduced recently.

I think that famous National Geographic photo of the Afghanastani girl was compelling mainly because of the choice of film. (Not sure which one, but most films preferred greens and blues)

That was very famously Kodachrome, so much so that the photographer, Steve McCurry was given the last roll ever produced.

Pretty sure it's this photo: https://i.pinimg.com/474x/a8/45/a5/a845a5fe73a57ad4bbaa75f1f...

Ektachrome was the other thing I shot a lot of. But you could never beat that Kodachrome Red.

There's no question that the technical results of a top digital camera blow film out of the f'in water. But that's what makes me nostalgic for the film days, in some ways. Getting a really fantastic film picture used to be a special occasion. I'd get an average of one a roll and that cost money. Now I get literally hundreds of amazing images a year and have to print them into big hardcover books to store them. So the special experience of finding that one amazing slide in your box is gone. Same thing with CDs and records. The vinyls are dominated on every parameter and that's what their charm is, like an old, lame, dog.

I don't miss the limitations of a roll of film, I usually took about 10-12 rolls of 120 film on a trip. thats 120-150 frames. Never bracketed, sometimes took two pictures of the same subject from different angles. The habbits carried over, with digital i shoot maybe twice as much (with about the same number of good pictures per trip, so for me more shots != more pics).

What i miss is the experience and workflow of a mechanical 6x6 TLR camera. You hold the camera at chest level, look down on the viewscreen, frame, then decide to take the picture or not. Nothing in digital does this yet.

I haven't used a TRL, so I don't see what's the difference from just using a digital camera that can flip the screen 90 degrees up? Like an Olympus M1 mk. 3, for instance?

It works in direct sunlight.

An interesting thread: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4270881

I was recently going through digitizing slides my father took when we lived in Nigeria in the mid ‘70s. One thing I noticed was the Kodachrome slides looked perfect—no color fading. Most of the Ektachrome and other E-6 type slides had significantly faded. They were mostly salvageable in Photoshop, but a lot of their color had gone.

Unfortunately Kodachrome will never come back like Ektachrome has. The development process was insanely complex compared to E-6 and it’s unlikely it would be cost effective for anyone to do it.

I have boxes and boxes of stereo slides shot on Kodachrome with a Stereo Realist camera. I need to scan them in for viewing on a modern 3D system, like VR goggles.

I learned on film as a kid, and sometimes I miss the idea of it a little, too. Then I think about how, today, I can take a hundred macro shots of a busily hunting wasp at zero incremental cost, then very quickly and easily "develop" the half dozen already excellent keepers to really bring out the same vivid colors and sharp contrast my mind's eye saw in the viewfinder image, and then make large-format, gallery-quality prints for $5 each in materials on a printer that cost me a hundred bucks brand new. And I don't miss the idea of film at all.

I think the value that film gives us lies more in the journey than in the final result. With vintage lenses and enough digital processing you approximate 90% of the aesthetic qualities of most old film stocks. Nothing can replace the romanticism of shooting with limited exposures, having to develop and scan and print, and embracing all the imperfections that come with the process.

I've been a "dedicated amateur" street / event photographer and photojournalist for a few years, and the decisions that have helped me improve the most have been 1) shooting with a wide prime (28-35mm) and 2) learning to shoot and develop film.

They give us these nice green colors...

That song is in constant rotation on Rochester radio. The annoying part is how he decries "all the crap he learned in high school" while lauding a technology that very much depends on people being educated enough to conceive of and produce it.

About a decade ago, I bought a slide scanner and scanned a bunch of old family slides. Some of it's the era, some the Kodachrome, but the colors look exactly like those photos. Here's a few: https://imgur.com/a/PkJiGGx

As for it being "archival," no, it's not. Some had pretty bad color shifts and started looking blue.

Bad article. Confuses technology to take pictures with technology to share pictures with strangers online.

If anything, Kodachrome was the phone camera of its time, but even that is comparing a horse-drawn carriage to a Mack truck.

... technology to share pictures. Online wasn't a thing then. Sharing pictures with strangers wasn't a thing then either. You'd be sharing the pictures with family and friends.

web2.0 jaded me would say 'instagram is a pale copy of <past tech that was inspiring and joyful>'

Not just of its time: Kodachrome works remarkably well for archival. Or "worked", since it's not made anymore and you can't develop it.

...and it was horrible for projection, fading quickly even as late as K14. You were generally good with slide viewers (Kodachrome can be found in most scenic Viewmaster discs), but light bright enough for projection would kill Kodachromes in no time at all, so you'd generally dupe to an Ektachrome or to a cine print film using an internegative.

Not very good for "traditional", dry scanning either. IR-based scratch/dust removal stuff in Nikon scanners didn't work on it. But at least if you don't project too often, the colors would last for a very long time.

not new article, from ~3 months ago, mostly glorified ad for a photography book.

A few other kodachrome articles and discussion back from maybe when it was more newsworthy - when it was being retired https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=669585 or an unseen archive of 1960s East London pics https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16363283

Any surprise that its original icon seemed to be a hybrid of the Instamatic Brownie and the Polaroid logo?

Can we effectively synthesize it with digital methods?

It's an onoging discussion between people that are really into computerized photography or image processing, but some filters and techniques used with specific hardware that you took your time to calibrate look pretty legit.

There are apps/plugins/filters that claim to recreate it, but like many other analog/digital comparisons, if you're rather used to looking at film grain with your naked eye or with a loupe, you will notice the difference.

Yes, however one needs to take into account the difference in viewing devices (screens are self illuminated and film/paper subtract colours from a light source) as well as the limited colour depth on modern monitors. After all, 10-bit colour wasn't available on mainstream GPUs until the last couple of years.

Fujifilm's digital cameras come with fantastic built-in digital versions of Kodachrome (called Classic Chrome), Provia, and Velvia. I personally use a X100T but I think all current models have them.

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