With the switch to digital and film's limited appeal, Kodak has announced the end of Kodachrome. It was a special process, originally processed only by Kodak. But it yielded outstanding color transparencies with bright colors and high sharpness.

So I'm commemorating the event by showing off some of my Kodachromes, going back fifty years. In that span, I've lost a fair number of them, to things like moves, a two year absence while in the army, and a fire in our house.

Some technical notes. The shots from before 1961 are shot on original Kodachrome, which had a speed of 12 ASA. The later ones are shot on Kodachrome II, which had the blazing speed of 25 ASA. They were made with various Canon cameras and lenses, both rangefinder and SLR. Lenses varied from 19mm to 100mm for most of these pictures. Some of the lenses were custom-made. The macro photos were for an article for Modern Photography, on a new method for shooting macros. They were made with 8mm movie camera lenses, mounted backwards on a Canon bellows, attached to a Canon SLR.