Alvis Upitis Photography: Motor Racing & Display Prints

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PLEASE DO TAKE MY KODACHROME™ AWAY

In the dark(room) days before the digital deluge, Kodachrome was King. Someday soon I’ll digress into how Kodak’s own Ektachrome and then Fuji’s Velvia impacted Kodachrome. That story too is one of transience.

 

Kodachrome was transparency (slide) film. Early on it came in large (8x10”) format sheets. In 35mm size it became synonymous with National Geographic and to this day the best of the people and scenic photos printed in the magazine have a Kodachrome look: soft but rich realistic colors with fine detail. At a Power of Women photo exhibit at National Geographic Headquarters, I was stunned on closely examining the famous Afghan Girl by Steve McCurry shot on Kodachrome and displayed as a 24x36” digital print. The color, detail, tone and texture were astounding. Were it possible to go back in time and re-shoot this iconic photograph using the most expensive digital system of today, I would ask “why?”.

 

Kodachrome was a black & white film to which yellow, magenta and cyan dye was added during development. It was a complex process and Kodak had labs worldwide to handle the job.

Every emulsion batch could have a slightly different color (like dye lots for fabrics). If I knew an emulsion had good color, I would buy a case (300 rolls) and store in my detached garage which was colder than my freezer. As an emulsion aged it took on a slightly warmer color and I knew photographers who kept rolls in an oven warmed only by a pilot light for a few weeks to accelerate aging.

 

Chicago had the closest lab to my Minneapolis base.  The camera store pickup was 1:30PM daily, putting the film into the lab that night and back on a plane the next morning for 2PM pickup. Driving home, I’d pause at a light and flip open one of many yellow boxes. Against the white interior lid I could quickly assess if exposures were good and be assured there were no blatant processing or camera glitches.

 

On large lightboxes, slides were edited down to what I wanted the client to see. Flawed slides were tossed; others were set aside as back-ups. After all were viewed, there might be one original slide from hundreds that perfectly filled the assignment goal. No perfect duplicate could be made. The standard fee for a lost slide was $1500.  If the original was lost or damaged the client would come back for a similar one and I needed to have something on file, even years later.

 

After editing, slides were run through a TRAK Printer to print up to six lines of caption information, copyright, name, etc. If the job was a large take, slides were delivered in Kodak Carousel Trays (bought in cases of 10) so clients could view projected slides in a conference room at a grand scale. If the job was small, up to 20 slides were placed in a plastic sleeve for delivery.

 

 

Before leaving Minnesota in 2002, I’d tossed some reject slides of a Bob Dylan’s Return to Minnesota Concert in 1978 into a dumpster. Years later, in Hawaii, I got an email from someone in Duluth, MN (where Dylan was born). He had found some of my Dylan slides in a landfill and would it be OK if he printed some to put on his apartment wall in Duluth?  A consortium of Russian, Chinese and North Korean operatives would have been hard pressed to have found those slides.

 

How many times had those slides been handled from film testing to camera loading to processing to editing to captioning and sleeving? They seemed important at the time. Yet in a recurring dream there is a glorious scene waiting to be captured and all I have in my favorite camera bag is Kodachrome. But I am unable to load it into my digital camera and ponder whether even if I did, how would I get it processed? (The last lab shut down in 2010.)

 

Before tossing the last large pile (but there are more!) of rejected slides I made the video after mulling the idea for many days.  I was just going to toss them via the garbage can as before.  But the Dylan story flashed by so I placed them in the firewall black construction grade black plastic bag first.

 

And the answer to your question is about 9000. (Full Disclosure: not all Kodachrome slides).

 

Virtually yours,

 Alvis