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Friday Slide Show: Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance
25 April 2025
One of the problems of being enamored of cutting edge technology is that what you do with it often ends up being orphaned, forgotten and lost. So it is with our Kodak PhotoCD images, captured with a Nikon film camera (the FM2 and FE2) and converted to Kodak's proprietary format for CDs.
That was a digital image of course but not one that even Photoshop can read now. It was designed to offer multiple resolutions suitable for both printing and display on a TV using a Kodak player.
And it didn't last long.
Thirty years later we're walking around the house with double vision thinking we have a slide show to produce for tomorrow's edition. Of what, we wonder.
Then we remember our stack of PhotoCDs.
Kodak processed the film, scanned it and burned the CD but it also printed indexes of the images that fit on the front and back covers of the plastic CD case.
Most of our PhotoCDs were of family occasions. And in fact so was this one. But this time to family gathered for the 1994 Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance where our godfather was showing off his recently acquired Simca.
We thought there would be enough images of cars to make a slide show of it, although we seemed enamored of red cars (before we suffered the usual digital camera sensor issues with capturing reds accurately). And we found ourselves wondering if these vintage images would hold up as well as the vintage cars had.
As for the PhotoCD images, the trick was to convert them to a modern format readable by Lightroom. And for that, we once again relied on the venerable GraphicConverter, which made quick work of it, converting them all to 3072x2048-pixel 600K JPEGs of the 6-MB images.
From there we processed them in Lightroom, relying on an Auto conversion to start with but sometimes setting the white balance manually. We did adjust the crops a bit (this was in the days before we owned a zoom lens) and straightened the images (we've always been a bit off kilter).
In the end, we have to say they don't look like 30-year-old images.
No telling what happened to these beauties after another 30 years. We can only hope the cars aged just as well.
