blacklog

I just exposed my last four Kodachrome film canisters. I bought a 50 pack last year when I heard Kodak had finally discontinued the stock. Along with other kinds of film, I have been scanning and posting my Kodachrome pictures on flickr, especially every time I travel back home to Mexico City, an incredibly film sensitive subject, rich in atmosphere, texture and stories to capture.

For a while now, Dwayne’s Photo has been the only lab in the world that develops Kodachrome, but they will stop processing it after the end of this year. I wonder what would have happened if I didn’t manage to finish all my film by then. Would it have been possible to figure out the chemistry and develop the film some other way? Would I be stuck with a bunch of pictures that I would never be able to see?

What is the impact over a medium when a technology becomes obsolete? Many would argue that the disappearance of Kodachrome—or even all film in general—will have little impact on the face of photography. Some even affirm that photography is by nature a digital medium that has been forced to tolerate the shackles of paper and dyes and primitive chemical processes, but I believe a medium is shaped by it’s content, and content is dependent on the tools and materials used to make it. Looking at things this way, one might even think that film and computer photography are two different mediums, and this might not be such a strange thing to think.

Meanwhile, I’ll just start using more Ektachrome, Fuji Velvia, and anything else with a thick photosensitive emulsion that comes my way.

Two years ago John took us to Home Depot. We bought supplies to create the PLWall, and had lunch at the Good Time Emporium: hot-dogs, fluorescent lemonades and sweet-n-sour gummy worms.

Tonight we added a farewell visit to the Good Time Emporium in the PLW countdown to-do list.

My PLW days are coming to an end.

Well that was fast, like three weeks at most for the next thousand pictures. All because I changed the way I sorted the tags from alphabetical order to popularity, and my friend Manzur wanted to put his trademark nickname gandul on top of the list. It became a tagging race for him, and I somehow felt that I should join. The resulting sequence of uploads was mostly dominated by Manzur, and picture number 4000 has his signature on it. You cant really tell what is going on in it, except that there is a concert and a stage, and thanks to the tags you can figure out that some of those big pixels might actually be Shakira, the colombian bombshell with a golden butt.

For now though, I am still winning.

My first Rails application. It only took me like a year to make one. It is a simple anonymous picture aggregator that features a tag system to organize the content in a picture-word network. Its architecture is as lightweight as possible to let the user look at pictures (or collect them) in the most direct possible way.

Several friends and I have been testing it from around a month and I have decided to put it out thanks to Brent’s wise advice, even though it is still incomplete. You can play with it here:

http://pixs.media.mit.edu/

I am working on adding pagination for the picture grid in the frontpage, and a reasonable way of sorting-browsing-searching through the tags.