BRAVE NEUF WORLD: Don't Take My Kodachrome Away!

Now that our vacation memories are filed away in a Microsoft “My Pictures” folder entitled, “Charleston, 2012”, I got thinking about the joy I once had in taking snapshots.

I had a Nikon camera. I loved to take a photograph.

I used to take hundreds and hundreds of snapshots that recorded our lives, our friends and families, our trips, our dogs, and our special occasions. Yeah, sure, digital cameras can do all that and more, what with tagging on Facebook and assembling albums on our Timelines and sending each other the latest breaking images from our phones of our every waking moment. But I used to love film. For me, digital photography has ruined a perfectly good hobby.

In the not so distant past, I used to love going to our local camera shop. I’d confidently ask for multiple rolls of Kodak Color Plus, 35 mm, ISO 200, 36 exposures, please, or Kodachrome 64 slide film with the processing and mounting included in the price. There would be that chemically aroma when I’d pop the top off those little black and grey canisters. And then I’d find it so satisfying to load the new roll into the old Nikon, matching those tiny square notches up with the sprockets inside and then listening for the sweet sound of the film engaging with the advancy thingy and settling into the first frame ready to take the most amazing images. There is nothing quite this tactile in the digital camera experience. You don’t even have to hold the view finder up to your eye for heaven’s sake! The whole camera-to-photographer relationship is so distant; so remote; so gone!

And when the roll was full, I’d race back to the camera store (drug store processing was never quite as good) to get it developed and printed. And what joy when the photos came back a week later. It was pure pleasure to hold 36 fresh 4x6 shots in my hands, to see the images for the first time, anticipating how happy and handsome we would look in each one. I wouldn’t look at them until I got home. It was cheating to sit in the car and leaf through the set; they deserved slow and rewarding contemplation. And to have the negatives, too, oh, joy! These offered the promise of duplication of the really nice shots for sending to friends and family as thoughtful Christmas gifts. Yes, digital photography can do all this. And I acknowledge the bonus of instant gratification, or instant deletion if you don’t like the image, but where’s the reward in that? Yeah, yeah, you can print them, but I find it just such a hollow experience to sit on a naughahyde stool in front of a touch screen at the pharmacy going press, press, press, on the shots I like and sending my order to the developing machine. The photos always come back looking flat and a bit iridescently yellow – the color not anywhere nearly as rich as on Kodak film – or even the least bit lifelike. Digital photos usually make me look like I have serious liver disease.

And then, and then, oh, how I loved to buy a new photo album with those clear magnetic pages that peeled back so you could arrange your photos in any old random which-way you chose. Or pop slides into a tray and wait for dark to have a show and expect the projector to jam and break down so many times that we’d be rolling on the floor laughing.

I mean, when was the last time you had a slide show or leafed through a photo album you made from your last trip? Not recently, I bet. Oh, you might occasionally browse through the hundreds of folders you have stored on your computer and squint at your thousand-odd, itsy-bitsy images so dinky you can’t even see who’s in them, all lined up in neat, regimented rows labeled with heart-warming captions like DSC000172.

And there they’ll stay. Unless the hard drive crashes.

I discovered today that Kodak film is still available online. But is it worth reliving the glory days? Likely not. Even though it gives us the nice bright colors. It gives us the greens of summer. It makes us think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah.

All that’s important is telling our stories. Which is what snapshots do, regardless of being digital or not.

So, here’s DSC000172 (aka: Ken and me on the beach, in the rain, in South Carolina, taken on Ken's iPhone)