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Stevie Wilson didn’t know that I shot pro for Corbis and Pacific stock for well over ten-years, doing editorial and travel photography for one of the two biggest stock photo houses on the planet. Back in the day, Corbis was called The Stock Market, and I shot hundreds of thousands of slides through an assortment of Nikon bodies and Nikkor glass and onto lots of my favorite film: Velvia, Fuji 100 (not Provia, just regular Sensia), and my most beloved Kodachrome 64.
While Fuji Ektachrome tended to be bright and brassy and a little green, K64 was always warm and rich and the favorite film of National Geographic shooters the world over for its grain. Well, Kodachrome is no more, which is a Kodacrime; however, if you can grab any of it anywhere, please grab as much of it as possible. Here’s a little known fact: Kodachrome gets better with age. It doesn’t get more predictable, but it gets better and in its age, magic happens.
In fact, lots of shooters used to keep K64 in the trunks of their cars in order to make it “better, quicker,” which has resulted in some of the most creative work I have musters, pre-Photoshop. Anyway, for those of you who don’t know, I was a photographer.
Also, the above photo was made by my dad, Bob Abraham, who was a shooter from the day I was born until the day he died. He collected all of these discarded slides forever until the day he made this image. There is a photo of him rolling around in the slides and I will post that one when I find it.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
A slide is a THING, which is becoming increasingly special.
And it turns your images back into light, which makes them alive in ways other photo media is not.
@AC: Thank you for that. I am going to start slowly scan every image, starting with my best and going from there. Now that you speak of the magic of things and the magic of light, captured, then I shall keep those slides, my dad’s and mine, in slide form as well. Also, when Mark came to help me with all the stuff my dad left behind after he passed and I had gone through his collected work, throwing away all of the “junk” and working on trimming his legacy down to his best, Mark just told me via IM, “It so hurt me as a total amateur to throw out bags and bags of those images. Every one of them was better than any photo I had ever shot.” Amen — it is so true. Thanks, Andrew.