Remembering Kodachrome – Commentary by Aidan O’Rourke

With the money I saved, I bought my first SLR camera a Fujc STX-1 at a shop near Times Square. It cost $70 I was experimenting with the camera and decided to try out long shutter speeds.

This was my very first time exposure in the camera. I had a roll of Kodachrome 25. I propped the camera up on the window ledge of my tiny room and pointed it down at the street. I set the aperture to f-16 and the shutter to the bulb setting.

I tried different shutter speeds probably 2s, 10s and 30s. This one must have been 30 seconds. we can see the red light trails of cars heading downtown along 9th Avenue. There’s a blue police car parked on the left-hand side and further up, a yellow Caprice Classic taxi.

It really was like being in a movie. The façade is lit up by the intense red of the Market Diner neon signs. Both film and digital have difficulty with red and so there are very few details and the light seems very intense.

The diner and its surroundings have the look of an Edward Hopper painting and look how the tree branches are blurred because they’re blowing in the wind. On the right there’s a British Austin 1100.

In the upper left are the tracks and overhead cables from Penn Station. The sign says ‘park fast’ – typical New York. When the package from Kodak arrived in the post a couple of weeks later, I tore it open and looked at the slides.

This one was one of my favourites. Nothing can replace the excitement of your early experiments in photography, but I can’t help feeling at photography has lost something with the demise of Kodachrome.