Age and treachery vs youth and skill

When I was home for dinner at my parent’s house last weekend, my dad and I got to talking about the last roll of Kodachrome ever manufactured, which was just recently shot by photographer Steve McCurry (best known for his photo of the Afghan girl with the beautiful eyes).

McCurry was given the roll by Kodak themselves, and it was developed at Dewayne’s Photo, in Parsons, Kansas, the only place left IN THE WORLD that can process Kodachrome.  Dewayne’s will only be offering processing through December 30th of this year, so if you’ve got any Kodachrome around, you’d better get shooting!

At this point, my dad mentioned that he had some sitting in the fridge from years ago, sealed and unexposed.  Cue me running to the kitchen and digging through a shoebox of expired film, and coming up with two rolls of 24 exposure, ASA 64 Kodachrome color slide film.

Now, I’ve only really shot film a handful of times in my life, and not at all recently.  This was mostly due to my lack of confidence with a camera, which was probably brought on by using terrible disposable cameras for most of my childhood.  Now that I know my way around an SLR a little bit, I would be a lot more comfortable shooting film, and I was really excited to shoot what many consider some of the “best looking” stuff ever made.  I threw both rolls in my bag, along with some assorted black and white film that I’d found, and excepted that to be that, but my dad had other ideas.

Just as a little background, my dad has been an avid photographer all his life, and has several old manual Nikon SLRs.  He’s got thousands of photos that he’s taken over the last 50 years, and will probably end up getting a digital SLR soon.  He proposed a little challenge.  We each take a roll, shoot it, and get it processed before December 30th, and then compare our photos (and post them online for others to compare), and see who is better.  Since I can’t resist a challenge like that, and since the film was technically his anyways, I agreed!  This will be an epic contest of new-school versus old-school, Canon versus Nikon, age versus youth!  I’m guessing dad will shoot with his Nikon, and I’m keeping an eye out for a good deal on a Canon EOS film SLR, so I can use my fancy lenses and work with controls I’m used to.  I’ll shoot a couple rolls before I do the real deal as well, just to get used to film.  I’ll probably post a bit about my experiences along the way, so keep an eye out for it!