They tell me that Kodachrome is fading from the picture of my world, but I refuse to let go.

In Parsons, Kans., the last laboratory in the world to process Kodachrome photographic film has shut down. Kodachrome had been faithfully and colorfully recording our world since its introduction in 1935. Digital technology did it in.

Serious and semi-serious photographers of the recent past quickly learned the difference between Kodachrome and Kodacolor, its negative twin. You bought Kodachrome if you wanted color slides that you could project onto a screen or on a light-colored wall. You bought Kodacolor if you wanted prints that could be pasted in an album. If you bought Kodachrome, you more than likely owned a 35mm camera, such as a Leica or a Nikon.

Both types of film produced scenes in vivid color if you got the exposure right and the subject in focus. I began using Kodachrome during the mid-1960s, after I acquired my first 35mm camera — a Nikon F that I bought from the widow of a newspaper photographer. It was strictly a seat-of-the-pants type of camera, with no electronic component whatever. You focused it manually. You set the exposure manually, using a combination of shutter speed and aperture size. Maybe you used a hand-held light meter occasionally, but that wasn’t always possible. You learned to “bracket,” changing your exposure with successive shots, hoping that one would be just right.

In retrospect, my best color photos were made with that old Nikon. It never told me that it couldn’t do what I wanted it to do. A later Nikon, as much computer as it was camera, was forever informing me, in English words and Japanese syntax, that it couldn’t do what I asked it to do. I didn’t own it long. I absent-mindedly left it in the floorboard of a cab Miss Peggy and I had taken in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I suffered the loss with few regrets.

The old Nikon let me make the decisions, and I learned the results after dropping off the film at Fotomat and picking up the slides or photos the next day. Fotomat had little yellow drive-by booths conveniently stationed in the parking lots of shopping centers — those places we used to shop before we had malls.

After I bought the Nikon, I made Kodachrome, or its cousin, Ektachrome, my film of choice. Kodachrome gave deeper colors. Ektachrome was a “faster” film, and it worked in lower light conditions. I always found it exciting to take a freshly processed roll of “color-positive” film, pop it into a carousel mated to my projector, and beam it onto a home screen. Over the years, I preserved in color slides scenes from the magnificent Appalachians, the snow-capped Rockies, the  Grand Canyon, California, Mexico, Europe, Russia, Central Asia, China, and five generations of my own family. After I had projected the slides, I chose the best ones and had Fotomat process them into prints. I took the very best ones to a camera shop to have them enlarged into 11- by 14-inch prints suitable for framing. Starting with color slides was the least expensive way of populating my albums.

In time, the inconvenience of inserting slides into carousels and setting up the screen took the edge of the excitement. The projector went unused, and it and the screen eventually vanished at some long-forgotten garage sale. Old prints gathered dust in envelopes and drawers as they accumulated faster than we could put them into albums. When I finally acquired a digital scanner, I began preserving all the old photos on CDs and flash drives. But my scanner would not do justice to the Kodachrome and Ektachrome slides.

Then Miss Peggy called my attention to a gizmo on sale at Kohl’s that promised to turn my slides into digital photos. I bought it, and suddenly my life reappeared in Kodachrome. The gizmo was balky and didn’t like having to work with the Vista operating system, but If I rebooted every now and then it got the job done. I became obsessed with the task of redocumenting my life and travels.

I saw again the cherubic face of a newborn son who is now a grandfather.  I discovered long-forgotten scenes from the camping trip I took with the kids back in 1972; from outings in the Shenandoah Valley during the ’60s and ’70s; from hikes on the Appalachian Trail during the ’80s. The Great Wall of China, the onion domes of Russia, the rugged villages of Siberia, the colorfully costumed people of Tajikistan, came back into view.

Children who have grown from infancy to middle age, and older relatives who have passed from the scene, came back in living color. 

I retired my latest Nikon in 2003, when I retired from my last newspaper. A little digital camera now serves me well, and I have resisted the temptation to buy something more expensive and more capable, even as I’ve envied the results my computer-wise children and grandchildren are obtaining with sophisticated digital equipment. My camera doesn’t do color slides, but it’s easy to transfer its images onto a flash drive and to send them to whoever has Internet access. I also mine Facebook for photos of the kids and grandkids that I want to keep.

But my most treasured images are those from the Nikons of the past ⁠— cameras that used film that had to undergo chemical processing in total darkness to produce slides or prints.

I may no longer be able to buy Kodachrome at my local drugstore, but I have a bushel of Kodachrome slides still shedding vivid color on my memory.

Write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625, or by e-mail at: WadesDixieco@AOL.com.