A 3-D Slide Show -- in Breathtaking Kodachrome

As I have mentioned before, I am a dedicated and long-time stereo photographer. The rugged Stereo Realist is my camera of choice. It was Made In the USA, in Milwaukee to be exact, and is one of those American built-to-last wonders of the post WWII-era. Other companies introduced more sophisticated stereo cameras with more features and simpler operation, but the good-old Stereo Realist just keeps taking the pictures I want it to take.

Shooting with a 60 year-old stereo camera means, obviously, that I use film. Very retro compared to the current mode of photography. This year I am shooting my way through my last supply of Kodachrome 64. Last summer, after 75 years, Kodak announced they are suspending production of that wonderful film. -- One of the earliest posts on Plumwood Road, June 23, 2009, dealt with the subject of Kodachrome's passing.-- I found a cache of this film at PJ's Camera in Glen Ellyn, Illinois and bought a brick of it. My camera has been souped-up in such a manner to enables it to shoot "wider" views, but that means it burns through a 36-exposure roll in only 20 clicks. I am trying to make my supply last through the year, which is also the last year that processing will be available.

As it happens, we have very few Kodachrome slides of any kind from my youth. My Dad was not a slide shooter. He shot black and white print snapshots. Nothing fancy. Although, some of the shots he took in World War II in China and India are pretty dog gone amazing.

My introduction to Kodachrome slide film came in the mid-1970s, when I was a motion picture camera assistant. I was working in the California desert on a car commercial. The still photographer's assistant saw that I was using some commonly available "vacation-type" slide film in my personal camera and gave me a roll of Kodachrome 25 to try.

"This is called 'The Good Stuff'", he said. "Use it once and I guarantee you'll never go back."

And he was right. Kodachrome is/was rich, vivid, crisp, sharp...and permanent. Properly stored some estimates claim it to be stable for 500 years. It is perfect for documenting for viewers in the distant future a record of the images we see around us now.

Most people remember slide shows when they were kids. It was a common form of entertainment in the 50s and 60s; gather in the living room, dim the lights and project last summer's vacation pictures for the neighbors.

The Kodachrome slide shows that I remember seeing were photographed and projected in 3-D.

Long time friends of my parents from our church were Emil and Stella Miller.

Emil Miller was corporate/portrait/wedding photographer in the post-WWII years in Dayton, Ohio. Stella ran the business. Though it may be hard to picture now, Dayton, Ohio was once a booming industrial center, home to NCR, Delco, Frigidaire, Mead Paper, Lau Industries and a host of other manufacturing businesses. It was a very prosperous Mid-Western city that was full of engineers, machine shops, factories, and aerospace firms. All of this provided Em and Stella with work and interesting photographic subject matter. During his assignments Em would often switch out his view camera or 6X6, and mount his Stereo Realist on the tripod and click off a few shots in 3-D for his personal collection. He had nifty views taken on the plant floors, inside offices, at the mill...the lady at the switchboard, the guy in the bow-tie with the clipboard, the sparks flying as the molten metal was poured, the line of bottles rattling along at the local Coca-Cola plant... all preserved in that perfect You Are There effect that only 3-D can capture.

Emil's business was very profitable. It allowed him and his wife to indulge their interests in art and antiques. They restored an old frame house and filled it with paintings. They enjoyed nice vacations, too; road trips in the summer, ski trips in the winter, as well as European or Asian travel. This they covered extensively in 3-D as well.

In the winter they hosted parties where they would project their slides; the kids sitting on the floor up front and the parents comfy on furniture in back and everybody wearing cardboard glasses. These shows were a lot of fun, not only due to the interesting subject matter but for the unusual 3-D effect. As the images clicked by, Stella or Em would narrate and tell us what we were seeing and who was in the picture. If you've never seen well-shot, well-projected 3-D pictures, it's quite an experience. We would look at the pictures and feel like we could step right into the screen and stand in front of the Eiffel Tower, or walk through the gates of the newly opened Disneyland. The pictures made quite an impression.

Years later, I began shooting Stereo pictures myself. This common interest put me in contact with the Millers who would phone from Ohio occasionally with questions like "where can I find supplies", or "who do you recommend to repair my projector?"

Sometime in the early 1990s, my wife and I, visiting family in Dayton, were invited to attend one of Emil and Stella Miller's 3-D shows. They had found a few boxes of old slides and thought we would enjoy seeing them.

That evening's show came as almost a shock: All of the views were shot on Kodachrome and projected as beautifully as the day they were shot. We saw pictures of my brother and me as boys, my parents as a young couple, adults and kids from church, There was a shot of Dave Rothman when he was about 10 years-old, standing next to his dippy sister, Diane, who had cooties. But, what did I know then? For the record, she was a dish the last time I saw her.

There were slides taken inside our old house, at a picnics with people long gone, of Dayton, bustling and decorated up for Christmas. In the mid-50s my brother and I had a pet raccoon and there were a couple pictures of him, still a young pup, sitting on my brother's shoulder or standing up on his hind legs mooching a handout. The pictures were so life-like I felt I could reach out and give the fuzzy little guy a scratch behind the ears. The show went on to highlight some of Emil's commercial work, views of Dayton, Ohio as it used to be, and of some of the travel Em and Stella enjoyed; all of it was interesting. The over-all effect was this: Emil Miller had taken a shovel and scooped up a load of random memories and flashed them on the screen.

The evening concluded with refreshments of soft-drinks, with ham and rye, sweet pickles, veggies with potato chips and dips -- all smells and tastes associated with the era in which most of the pictures had been taken.

In 2002 my wife and I were in Dayton. Stella had passed a few months earlier and we found Em packing boxes in the dining room. He was breaking up their art collection and selling the house in preparation to move into a retirement community.

"While you're here, I have something you may be able to get more use out of than me..." Em opened a closet, shifted a few boxes around and got out his Stereo Realist projector, which to this day is the only genuine "Realist" projector I've ever seen. It was a phenomenal gift and one for which I was very grateful.

Along with the projector he gave me four boxes crammed with stereo slides.

"These are not my best slides" he said. "But I won't have room for them in the new place. Maybe you could look through them and see if there is anything you want to keep."

It took my wife and me several days to get through all the slides. They were all interesting and fun. Yes, I could see that some of them were misfires or out-takes, but there were some gems in the collection as well.

I stayed in touch with Em, over the next few years and on visits would stop by his apartment and say hello. He was a handy fellow with tools and kept busy hanging pictures and making repairs for the widows in the community.

After a while I began thinking about the rest of his stereo slides, the ones he'd shot at church functions, of my parent's 50th wedding anniversary, the views inside factories and old airliners, "the good ones" that he had kept. I wondered if he had any idea what he planned to do with them. I knew they were more personal to him, so I put off any questions. I would have loved to have had them. But, as it turned out, I never got the chance to ask.

In the fall of '07 Em didn't return a couple calls I had made. When we stopped by at Christmas time his apartment was empty. We were told that Em had died several months earlier. An auction had been held for his remaining artwork.

But, sadly, all those slides were tossed into a dumpster.


This article was published earlier by The Kodachrome Project. If you are a photographer you will enjoy going to that site and taking a last look at that wonderful, soon to be gone, film...Kodachrome.

Goodbye, Kodachrome

It has happened more times than any of us can count: An artist, a writer, an inventor or some individual who has made significant contributions to a particular field lives beyond his creative prime and dies in obscurity.

It’s a familiar story: After a particular Creative Genius has given what he had to give, the world moves on without him. After a while his original achievements are taken for granted, maybe even denigrated as “passé”. Forgotten, his passing is little noticed and less mourned.

But then…with enough time and under the right conditions the true worth of the former Creative Genius is rediscovered. There is collective delight among the public. Wonderment is followed by curiosity: “Look at what fresh, enduring work that was, and so long ago.” “Why was this Creative Genius ignored and forgotten when his work displays such obvious merit?”

This phenomenon is happening again, only this time not in regard to a particular artist, but a specific technical medium.

On June 22nd, 2009 Eastman Kodak Co. announced it was ending production of its Kodachrome film.

Casual photographers and even most professionals will take little notice. According to The Wall Street Journal, for the last few years Kodachrome has accounted for less than 1% of Kodak's diminishing film sales. Photography has gone digital to a greater degree and faster than many thought likely. Eastman Kodak executives themselves believed digital photography was a toy and failed to get involved with it until it was almost too late.

Most people are delighted with digital pictures. Recent developments in the medium have been truly impressive. But before we wave goodbye to Kodachrome we need to consider not what made it a great film in the past, but rather why it will be relevant in the future.

Kodachrome was introduced in 1935 as the first practical color film. Before that, all was black & white – or costly and complicated color that required a special camera.

Kodachrome not only solved the color problem, it did so spectacularly. Even the earliest versions of the film are renowned for vibrant color and image sharpness. It was incredibly precise and accurate. In fact, the film was limited only by the shooting equipment and the talents of the photographer. Improve your skills and use better lenses, was the only way to improve results. In terms of what you put in your camera, Kodachrome delivered the goods.

Through most of the 20th century Kodachrome was the color film of choice partly because there wasn’t much choice. There were early versions of Ektachrome. Agfa, Fuji, Dufay and some others came out with different color films. But the results, though less expensive, were clearly inferior.

No matter what kind of color film is used, Kodachrome offers a single unique characteristic that is only now being appreciated, and will be valued even more with the passing of time: It produces images that are nearly permanent. As long as the film itself is not destroyed the picture will remain.

A box of Kodachrome slides kept in the bottom of a drawer or the back of a closet will be as crisp and vibrant one hundred years from now as the day it was shot. Kept under archival conditions of controlled temperature and humidity it is said to be stable for 500 years. Maybe more.

Our visual impression of the world before the invention of photography is based solely on paintings, drawings, stone carvings and written descriptions. But with Kodachrome, there it is; the world in full color, going back to 1935.

Think of it. One hundred, two hundred, or five hundred years from now someone can open a box of Kodachrome slides and hold them up to a light and see a perfect image of Pop and Uncle Harold standing around the backyard grill; a ‘53 Pontiac is parked in the driveway. They can see Winston Churchill and General Eisenhower, rumpled, meeting after D-Day. Or they can look down a neighborhood street in St. Paul, Minnesota and see exactly what it looked like in the mid-20th century. These pictures are largely snapshots of people, places and things, not spiffed up for a photograph, but presented informally as they truly were. They are detailed documentary proof of a civilization as it once existed.

My point here is to suggest that this is an occasion of reflection. If you have a few Kodachrome slides somewhere, they’re likely in fine shape. Go ahead and take a peek just to refresh your memory.

For the next five centuries the world will retain this bright 75 year-wide window into the 20th and very early 21st century. People centuries from now will be able to look back through it and see us as we really were.

We are now in an era when the record of what goes on around us is entirely electronic. This is good in terms of instant communications, as the pictures coming out of Iran attest. But what the digital age offers in terms of speed and convenience, it takes away in the form of permanence and durability. Within a generation most of what is digitally shot today will be gone, either erased or irretrievable. This is a tragic bargain.

Sure, photographic records will exist in the Ivory Tower, at some level of officialdom. But “We the people” will have lost the means of preserving the image of who we really are. No more views will be preserved of every day lives, of the changing backyards, of families, living rooms or streetscapes of America. They may be here today, but they’ll be gone soon enough.

Happily, Kodak has made major improvements in their newer Ektachrome films. In terms of visual quality they rival, and in some ways surpass Kodachrome, but in terms of permanence there is still work to be done. I have heard that new Ektachrome stocks are now much less prone to fading as they once were. Supposedly they can last for nearly a century. That’s better than nothing. But, I believe that somewhere down the road, well before the year 2500, we will miss the long timeline of Kodachrome.

Some day in a future archive someone will look up from a light table full of slides and marvel, “Wasn’t that a terrific medium of record they had back then? I wonder why they threw it away.”