Kodachrome

Milady and I were talking about cameras yesterday and we remembered the little 110 cameras that were so ubiquitous to our adolescence and young adult-hood and how our grandchildren love their digital cameras.

A friend's child was over last week and complained that her camera wouldn't take photographs and I asked her innocently if she had film in it? She looked at me as if I were daft.

Today I learn that Kodachrome is finished. Done. Kaput. We all grew up with Kodachrome and it's over.

Kodak stopped making Kodachrome in 2009, and stopped making the chemicals needed to process it, a complex process that could never be done in home darkrooms. Kodachrome had been pushed aside by the replacement of home movie cameras by digital camcorders, and the collapse of the color-slide market. Today, in Kansas, the world's last remaining Kodachrome processing lab shuts down. The end. Forever.

Yes, you can still take your film to a one-hour photo processor and have it developed, but Kodachrome is done and that's the end of an era.

And another bit of my childhood passes into obsolescence.