Africa, Kodachrome, and Mike

By now I'm sure everyone has read that Kodak will no longer produce Kodachrome film.

It came as sad news to swallow. I was thinking about how one of the major photography moments in my life came about in Africa as a teenager. The image above is in Tanzania Africa. It's in Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania called
" The Cradle of Mankind" the birth place of humanity. Where they found the oldest fossils of humans on earth.

That's me in the Van Halen shirt. I know....
bad choice in my decision for making a safari wardrobe malfunction.
I did a quick scan of this image to show you clearly you can see how film is a living organic thing. Make sure to click on the image to make it big to view how it is chemically changing.

You might notice the guy sporting the nice afro - his name was Mike Taylor and he was our guide and driver. He drove a VW Bus with a hatch top roof so we could shoot the wildlife as we raced across the Serengeti from one National Park to the other. I'll never forget the rhinos, wildebeest and other wildlife chasing us as we tried to escape while shooting with gleeful excitement. Most of my photo's of the wildlife were out of focus to to the bumpy dirt roads and the manual 70-200mm lens on the my Canon AE-1. This was one of the first times learning to expose slide film correctly and all of the unforgiving issues for miss calculating the exposure.
I still have the camera in my collection.

I stayed in touch Mike a few years and then lost contact. I came across a letter from him that was with my slides. so I searched for him on the internet and found out that he is still a safari guide. Got to love the internet!


The image below was Kodachrome as well. While attending school at the Art Institute of Atlanta we had a color class where we had to produce a Internegative onto 4x5 film. I used this image of my dad & I on the third day of our accent on Mt. Kilimanjaro.



Goodbye Kodachrome...you will be missed.