Widely available and affordable colour film also helped develop bird photography, enabling detailed images such as these roosting Dunlins to be taken by the likes of Eric Hosking in 1947.
54 : Kodachrome 35mm film
1936
Widely available and affordable colour film also helped develop bird photography, enabling detailed images such as these roosting Dunlins to be taken by the likes of Eric Hosking in 1947.
It is not just the availability of a new technology that can inspire a revolution in popular activity, but also its affordability. Kodachrome 35 mm film was one such innovation, and though eventually outcompeted by even cheaper and more convenient brands, it was probably the most successful commercially sold early colour celluloid still and cinema film.
Developed by the Eastman Kodak Company, the product represented the first retail success of a colour film that used the ‘subtractive colour’ method still in use today. This technology involved three primary colours being overlaid and absorbing (or subtracting) certain wavelengths to provide a visual representation of the majority of colours that exist in the natural world. This had the advantage of using the actual properties of light rather than the complicated ‘additive’ mixing of (sometimes counter-intuitive) combinations of coloured inks and dyes that earlier film brands used. The elements of additive colour always became visible on enlargement, and required a large amount of power when used as slide projections owing to their high absorption capacity for light.
Though colour film had existed since the turn of the 20th century, three-colour subtractive Kodachrome was first pushed into the market in 1936 as a 35mm still photography film for professional use, though its price did not prohibit amateurs from also using the product. The film, famed for its fine-grain emulsion, is still regarded as one of the most stable brands in storage. It was initially one of the better slide films (though more specialised products were later developed), and carried the equivalent of approximately 20 megapixels of information in its transparent 24mm x 36mm image. Its complex processing requirements meant that it was sold as ‘process-paid’ (though this was stopped in the US by a legal ruling in 1954).
This high quality made colour wildlife photography accessible to the hobbyist, opening doors for professionals and the public alike to disseminate their work via widely circulated magazines such as National Geographic and, later, Animals (now BBC Wildlife), as well as in books and exhibitions about the natural world. Kodachrome was even immortalised in the name of a US state park (Utah’s Kodachrome Basin SP), as well as a 1973 Paul Simon song.
Always highly regarded but later suffering from stiff competition from the likes of Agfa and Fujichrome, it was the even wider accessibility and convenience of digital photography that eventually sealed Kodachrome’s fate. Production ceased in 2009, with the last colour film being processed in January 2011 before processing chemicals ran out forever. A year later, struggling to cope with the transition from film to digital, Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.