Kodachrome 64

[daveh]

As well as the Pentax SFXn kit(see other thread) I got a dozen rolls of Kodachrome 64 film, use before 2007 (but fridge stored).

I know Kodak have stopped producing Kodachrome, but does anyone know if they are they still developing it? I've had a quick look but can't find anything at the moment.

[Deleted]

I think the last lab is scheduled to close by the end of the year.

[daveh]

Wayne, thanks.

I doubt I'll get much, if any, used by then. It will be interesting to find out what will happen if it is processed in other chemicals. I know about the differences in the colour chemistry, Kodachrome v E6, but not what that would mean in terms of results.

[PeterW]

Dave,

I think the last lab to process Kodachrome (I have an idea it was called K14 process, but I may be mistaken) has now discontinued it.

Processing in C41 or E6 is, I understand, hopeless. You are likely to end up either with a blank piece of film or some very muddy negative pictures.

As I understand it, Kodachrome was basically a very fine grained black and white based film with colour couplers added during processing. I have heard of people successfully processing it as monochrome negative in D76. I have also heard that it can be reversed using D76 to give beautiful black and white transparencies with a very wide greyscale but, again, I don't have any details. Nor do I know at what speed to expose it.

If long-term memory from my college days in the 1940s still serves me (and it doesn't always) I seem to remember the process involved an intermediate exposue to white tungsten light half-way through developing.

You might get some ideas if you hunt for old processes about reversing black and white plates to give black and white lantern slides. D76 is a very ancient developer and used to be called metol-hydroquinone (or metol-quinol) before it had various fine-grain buffers added to deal with high-speed grainy films.

If I can find anything in some of my ancient books I will, but they're all still packed away, so don't hold your breath.

You could try searching the net or perhaps ask Kodak about it. Sometimes Kodak can give very short answers - usually "don't" - but other times they can be very helpful. I think it may depend on whether or not the person who handles your query is the sort of process techncian (usually in this digital age one of the older ones) who loves playing about with different chemical processes.

Best of luck. Hope you can use the film somehow to get some unique pictures, but I think colour transparencies from it are out.

PeterW

[daveh]

My presumption was that with there being no colour couplers that it would process (if E6 used) as a coloured black and white - black and white with a colour cast, as it were.

The old reversal processes* had an initial black and white development followed by reversal of the image by exposure to light, and then the colour development. Later processes used chemical reversal. Kodachrome was always more complicated and I gather used a separate developer for each colour, as well as having the couplers in the developer. (* I don't mean the oldest reversal processes which were completely different.)

Logically, I suppose, with no colour couplers, it becomes something like a modern generation black and white film.

It would appear that a Swiss lab do still process Kodachrome as well as the lab in the USA. I need to investigate that further.

Just found the exact information:
Swiss accepting till 30th November 2010.
American till 31 December 2010.

[mickeyobe]

This should explain the processing of Kodachrome.
PeterW is correct. It is K14.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-14_process

Aren't computers wonderful --- when they behave?

Mickey

P.S.
Leopold Gozowsky And Leopold Mannes, the two musicians who invented Kodachrome.
"Leopold Godowsky, Jr. (1900–1983) was an accomplished violinist who played with many prominent symphony orchestras. Early in his career, he performed jointly with his father Leopold Godowsky, one of the greatest pianists and composers of the early twentieth century. This strong family connection to the arts continued when Godowsky, Jr. married Frances Gershwin, sister of George and Ira Gershwin, and a vocalist who later became a recognized painter and sculptor. Godowsky, Jr. and Leopold Mannes (1899–1964) discovered common passions in both music and photography while in high school. After seeing an early experimental color movie, the two teenagers set out to "make perfect motion pictures in natural colors." (This search for color began with James Clerk Maxwell's experiments in additive color in the 1860s and accelerated when Auguste and Louis Jean Lumière patented the color Autochrome process in 1903, but a successful solution to a full-color, fine-grained film had not yet been achieved.) While continuing their musical pursuits, Godowsky and Mannes collaborated on color film experiments throughout college, often in hotel and family bathrooms, regularly whistling bars of classical music to measure development time. In the 1920s, Lewis Strauss (later to become Chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission) helped finance the two researchers. In 1930, Dr. C. E. Kenneth Mees, first director of the Eastman Kodak Research Laboratories, hired Godowsky and Mannes and soon thereafter brought them to Rochester, NY, set them up in a lab, and placed scientists at their disposal in order to accelerate their research."

[Deleted]

Yep. With E6 the colors layers are included in the film and chemically developed. With Kodachrome the color has to be added during the development. That's why there was never a home development kit for Kodachrome. Too complicated and expensive.

Back in the day I developed hundreds of Ektachrome in E6 which was great because the reversal was chemical. In the early Ektachrome developers the film had to be "flashed" --exposed to light, part way through the precess, to reverse it.

When we did slide dupes and needed multiple sets we sometime would roll two rolls of film back to back on a stainless steel reel with the emulsion sides of both rolls facing out. You could do eight rolls in a four roll tank. We only did that for presentations where color wasn't critical because it was tough to control contrast and dupes tended to be contrasty anyway.

W.