Kodachrome, it gives us those nice bright colors

Gives us the greens of summers,

Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah!

I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph

So momma, don't take my Kodachrome away.

-Paul Simon, on photography’s greatest film

Kodachrome is dead.

The film so great that rock stars sang about it is the latest old-school technology to fall under the wheels of the digital revolution. The photographic community has already endured the recent demise of the Polaroid, but the company's announcement that it will no longer make the film is a bigger blow.

Kodachrome was the first color still film readily available to everyone, but it was widely regarded as the film for professional photographers. It was the film for the globe-trotting National Geographic shooters. It was the film referred to in movies and media, and its color was a visual stamp on the world's retinas for almost 75 years. Kodachrome's red was the hue that photographers using other films could only dream of.

You couldn't process this film in your basement, nor could you get it processed at your local photography store. This special film had to be sent off to Rochester, New York, to the great yellow halls of Kodak headquarters to be processed in the secret Kodachrome soup.

When your copy of National Geographic hit the mailbox, you'd marvel at the richness, clarity and crispness of color those photographers captured. The film was synonymous with the early days of adventurous photographers in exotic lands, capturing photographs of things people and places few knew existed.

Because Kodachrome was a slide film, also known as transparency film, it was not as forgiving of the exposure-challenged and getting those amazing photographs you saw in your mind's eye wasn’t as easy as you had hoped. This was part of the allure of Kodachrome. If you could master all the challenges, you too could have a frame worth singing about.

Unlike what some would have you believe, these were not the good old days of photography. There was no auto-exposure, no auto-focus, no RAW files, no ETTL, no chimping and no "fixing it in Photoshop."

But I challenge anyone to take a peek at Uncle Bob's Kodachromes in the basement and not be in awe of the color renditions and the sensory overload of actually holding a chrome up to the window and seeing the world in a way we can't begin to appreciate while staring into our computer screens.

Long live Kodachrome.