From the archives: Kodachromes from Boston 1944

I recently looked through a box of my father's slides and found a few from Boston from 1944. He had recently returned from a job in Puerto Rico and was spending a few months with relatives in Boston. I hoped that he had more showing the city streets and commercial activity, but all I found were three "pretty" pictures. They are Kodachrome slides, taken with an American-made Perfex camera. The river is the Charles, and Back Bay is on the opposite shore. I scanned these with a Plustek 7600i film scanner, controlled with SilverFast Ai software. Consider that these are 75 years old, and there is an amazing amount of image data present. Will our digital files be readable in 75 years? (Bwahaahaa!!)

Ahhhh... memories...

Excellent. Those photos look like they could've been made today.

Hey - anyone here in Boston? Would be nice to see those identical views photographed today.

It's unfathomable to me that the one method of image capture in all the history of man is discontinued. By all rights, all other kinds of film would have died out with only Kodachrome remaining.

KN4SMF said:

It's unfathomable to me that the one method of image capture in all the history of man is discontinued. By all rights, all other kinds of film would have died out with only Kodachrome remaining.

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The "one kind?" Did you perhaps leave out a word? Something like "permanent" or the meaningless "archival?"

I have a large collection of Kodachrome transparencies that I exposed over many decades, mostly 35mm, but quite a few 120 too. All are in excellent condition, and will almost certainly remain so for the rest of my life. However, every one of them are on cellulose acetate base, which will, eventually, become "vinegary" and then disappear. No one should deceive themselves. Any images worthy of long-term preservation are best kept in digital form, and made part of a maintenance program that includes regular backup/copying as well as format conversion when technology evolves over time. I miss and love Kodachrome, but am not so naive as to think it could outlive properly cared for digital data.

KN4SMF said:

It's unfathomable to me that the one method of image capture in all the history of man is discontinued. By all rights, all other kinds of film would have died out with only Kodachrome remaining.

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Why would you expect Kodachrome to survive, when by its nature it requires the highest volume of throughput and the most expensive type of machinery in order to process it.
Kodachrome only made sense when there were millions of feet of film - much of which was movie film - running through machines that were the size of a city bus.

I still can’t believe that Plus-X is dead.

Regarding the pictures... they are the Boston I grew up in. Love that city and loved a relaxing Swan boat ride!

Yes I did leave out a word. Cellphone spellcheck changes things all the time. The word is "best". Sorry. Some things were justnever bettered when you consider across-the-board points.