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- Jul 14, 2011
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Alan - what spelled out the demise of Kodachrome was its unique complex development combined with Kodak foolishly consigning that slide development to a third party having lower quality control than they did. People weren't happy. Velvia wasn't on the horizon yet. And to this day, many photographers wish Kodachrome was still around.
In fact, the predominant chrome sheet film in the US was Ektachrome 64, which wasn't as contrasty or saturated as current Ektachrome. Then Fujichrome 50 showed up as the grandfather to both the Provia and Velvia series, with Astia being a gentler rendition.
Even in the really tiny country store where I grew up, one could always count on two types of film being on hand : Kodachrome and Kodak Gold. They were kept on the same shelf as the rifle ammo and shotgun shells. And as a favor to me, the storekeeper even added a bit of pre-E6 Agfachrome with prepaid mailers. He made runs to the city once a week in his pickup, and would bring back snapshots and processed slides, and yes, even inexpensive album prints made from slides rather than color negs. None of those prints were of particularly good quality; but machine generated internegs for sake of casual C prints were quite common, or else R prints directly from slides. If someone wanted exciting color, they pulled out the slide projector instead.
At a commercial level, advertising was just one aspect. Portrait pros needed the softer kind of palette color negative films provided,
along with relatively affordable chromogenic prints. Dye transfer printing, mainly from chromes, was an expensive luxury which most people didn't even know about. Then came the Cibachrome revolution, not cheap either, but simpler to do.
Most stock photo agencies wanted easily "readable" large format sheet film chromes. 35mm slides weren't generally accepted except in certain niche categories : sports, wildlife, and photojournalism like Natl Geo did.
In fact, the predominant chrome sheet film in the US was Ektachrome 64, which wasn't as contrasty or saturated as current Ektachrome. Then Fujichrome 50 showed up as the grandfather to both the Provia and Velvia series, with Astia being a gentler rendition.
Even in the really tiny country store where I grew up, one could always count on two types of film being on hand : Kodachrome and Kodak Gold. They were kept on the same shelf as the rifle ammo and shotgun shells. And as a favor to me, the storekeeper even added a bit of pre-E6 Agfachrome with prepaid mailers. He made runs to the city once a week in his pickup, and would bring back snapshots and processed slides, and yes, even inexpensive album prints made from slides rather than color negs. None of those prints were of particularly good quality; but machine generated internegs for sake of casual C prints were quite common, or else R prints directly from slides. If someone wanted exciting color, they pulled out the slide projector instead.
At a commercial level, advertising was just one aspect. Portrait pros needed the softer kind of palette color negative films provided,
along with relatively affordable chromogenic prints. Dye transfer printing, mainly from chromes, was an expensive luxury which most people didn't even know about. Then came the Cibachrome revolution, not cheap either, but simpler to do.
Most stock photo agencies wanted easily "readable" large format sheet film chromes. 35mm slides weren't generally accepted except in certain niche categories : sports, wildlife, and photojournalism like Natl Geo did.
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