Kodak has announced that its longtime stalwart brand, Kodachrome, will soon be no more. After 74 years and untold millions of frames, capturing everything from backyard birthday parties to big game, Kodak has run its last batch of the film. And the only place in the world that develops it has said it will stop doing so after 2010.

It's sad-Kodachrome was one of those benchmark products that became synonymous with taking extra care to obtain the best images possible. As a kid, I loved the weirdly chemical smell of freshly opened film packets - before film canisters became common - and the finicky process of clumsy young fingers trying to load a camera.

One of the most iconic photos taken with Kodachrome is Steve McCurry's photo of an Afghan girl, shown on the blog page. Regarded as one of the most recognizable photos ever shot, its subject remained anonymous for more than 20 years before McCurry returned and finally located her. The haunting eyes bespeak the difficulties of that country 24 years ago as war gripped it; and are as current as today's headlines.

Here at Hammock, our designers have worked with images on Kodachrome and just about every other film variety you can think of in the past 18 years, except maybe disc film. The shift from print and transparency to digital formats occurred with almost breathtaking speed; though we still receive a share of print images, mainly from readers, I can't recall the last time we got slides. But if we did, you can be assured the quality of photos from them would be as high as we could make it.