2015 - No Prints to be found.

JBrunner said:

People get what they deserve, damn right. For every one like you that gets it there are literally a hundred who don't, and will suffer to greater or lesser degree depending on luck. The big difference is that digital media requires an active, ongoing, and participatory scheme to both preserve images, and keep them retrievable. Film media is largely passive, and it's archival nature is built in. Digital has many advantages, but inherent preservation isn't anywhere among them. Unless someone values a digital file (they aren't actually images in "native" form) and takes an active role in its preservation it will cease to exist or become difficult or impossible to retrieve on a relatively short time line, historically speaking. The bad part of that is that it is very hard to tell what will really be important, so the kinds of historical record that is occasionally discovered today will have become a thing of the past when researchers try to get a picture of our now and near future, in the distant future. What will be around will be what is chosen by the choosers to be around, not the kind of random record that documents the zeitgeist of an era as we have had. There will be fragments of course, and future archeologists will conclude that we worshiped sunsets, cats, and tweefed inanity on something called a twitter. Historically, I'm pretty sure it will be considered a society without much substance who cared so little as to not even leave a decipherable record, for while we may feel awash in information, it is largely transient. Will my distant progeny have this post? I have letters my great grandfather wrote and received, and my hands touch that same paper, read the same words, in his handwriting. I can see where he rested the pencil tip while he thought of the next sentence. A finger smudge on one that was his finger. The Tally book he kept in his breast pocket when he rode the range, containing counts, brands, reminders, who owed him, and random thoughts of the kind that are now tweefed into ether. We are really losing something, and it's far more than just photographs, and it is very very sad. There are very few men of letters left.

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Well said. It seems to me that on an episode of Buck Rogers, there was something said about the lack of information (possibly photos, I'd have to watch the episode again) from the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This also made me think about printing more, whether it be digital or film. It also made me wonder about claims of so-called archivability of digital photography. I've had CD's fail.

Let's just consider whether people really get what they deserve......

I don't believe that the statement about people getting what they deserve is even remotely a universal truism. There are people all over the world, in all countries who are, for example, victims of their circumstances and who, but for a tiny amount of care from their leaders, suffer malnutrition, torture and death - or even just inequality over free healthcare treatment and medicine. They "deserve" better.

Insofar as technology is concerned, we now see a generation who have no clue as to what vinyl records are (or how to play them, or how much better they are than CDs and MP3s), or know what a video tape is and that also believe that CD's are 'dated'. This is, in part, due to the relentless march of technology - much of which does not actually "improve" anything - just makes it quicker or more convenient.

Another, more culpable, cause - in my opinion, is poor teaching (and I include "parenting" and sales advice in that definition). As photographers, we all have the opportunity to share our knowledge with the generations that follow us and to reinforce the need to consider the pros and cons of this over that. However, when was the last time that any of us read in the supposedly expert trade press that prints from film really do look better than those from a digital file / inkjet printer combo?

I say this as someone who enjoys both digital and analogue photography. I love film and I take every opportunity to try to show the difference to anyone interested in photography. However, I also enjoy the speed and convenience of my digital camera and, I must say, that I'm generally very happy with the quality I get back from the Nikon D700.

However, I think it's probably truer to say that people are misled by some of the marketeers claims made about archival quality of digital files and prints made from them. Photography product development is very much "marketing led" rather than "customer focused" these days. We, the customers, deserve better.

The truth is out there, but it really takes some finding.

hoffy said:

Yeah, I suppose things like CD's were such a failure.....

...............................

I think Mr Brunner summed it up perfectly. People get what they deserve, but It does cut either way.

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In a way, yes, as an archival tool. "CD rot" will affect a CD-R or DVD-R long before a film negative or print stored in the same conditions will. Probably 99% of people won't buy "archival" CD's and DVD's that are supposed to last 100 years, not that we will know for another 90 or so...

And again, who is to say that we will be alble to find a CD rom in 30 years? They simply may not make them, and an old one likely will not properly interface with whatever computers we are using as we approach mid-century. Whatever the soloution is; it will be a lot more complicated than finding an old shoebox.

I agree with Mr Brunner as well. Irresponsability, when met with failure, is nobodys fault but their own.

darinwc said:

I think photographers are more likely to take better care of the original images than most folk, either film or digital.

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During the photographer's lifetime it is likely that the digital files which are backed up and stored in multiple locations have a slightly better chance of survival than negatives and prints.

Once the photographer has gone though, the storage box has the advantage of needing no regular maintenance.


Steve.

With digital, I've got about 400 snaps. Guess what got printed... only about 12 images. It's some kind of laziness. With film, I must print if It's C41, and slides aren't printed.

My next project is spending a Kodachrome roll documenting my small village.
I've even want to write something with the typewriter about this. At least there will be some story to tell.
I'll honor both of the "official" photographers of the village, one passed away recently. Both still shot film. Guess It's time to have another photographer to document the village.

I'm going further into film photography, and now, It feels weird to not have a physical original (negative or tranny). This is something very advantageous of film, It's possible to have reprints with negatives. Recently, I found some B&W negs that my father shot; later, I found small 8x10 cm prints. If I had only the prints, nothing else can be done. But, I can, in a future, make bigger silver gelatin prints in a darkroom.

There's a room in my grandma's house that holds all the photos, aside of the prints, negs and slides, there are some tapes. Betamax and old camcorder tapes. Since I haven't got a betamax or videotape reader. It's just a black cartridge with black magnetic tape. If instead of slides and prints I had some HDDs. Bad... I wouldn't have seen anything.

Prest_400 said:

there are some tapes. Betamax and old camcorder tapes. Since I haven't got a betamax or videotape reader. It's just a black cartridge with black magnetic tape.

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My wife's aunt had her super eight home movies transfered to video for future generations. We recently watched them using a projector as no one had a Betamax video machine to view the tapes on.


Steve.

Paul Jenkin said:

Let's just consider whether people really get what they deserve......

...

The truth is out there, but it really takes some finding.

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Paul, I couldn't agree with you more...

JBrunner said:

People get what they deserve, damn right. For every one like you that gets it there are literally a hundred who don't, and will suffer to greater or lesser degree depending on luck. The big difference is that digital media requires an active, ongoing, and participatory scheme to both preserve images, and keep them retrievable. Film media is largely passive, and it's archival nature is built in. Digital has many advantages, but inherent preservation isn't anywhere among them. Unless someone values a digital file (they aren't actually images in "native" form) and takes an active role in its preservation it will cease to exist or become difficult or impossible to retrieve on a relatively short time line, historically speaking. The bad part of that is that it is very hard to tell what will really be important, so the kinds of historical record that is occasionally discovered today will have become a thing of the past when researchers try to get a picture of our now and near future, in the distant future. What will be around will be what is chosen by the choosers to be around, not the kind of random record that documents the zeitgeist of an era as we have had. There will be fragments of course, and future archeologists will conclude that we worshiped sunsets, cats, and tweefed inanity on something called a twitter. Historically, I'm pretty sure it will be considered a society without much substance who cared so little as to not even leave a decipherable record, for while we may feel awash in information, it is largely transient. Will my distant progeny have this post? I have letters my great grandfather wrote and received, and my hands touch that same paper, read the same words, in his handwriting. I can see where he rested the pencil tip while he thought of the next sentence. A finger smudge on one that was his finger. The Tally book he kept in his breast pocket when he rode the range, containing counts, brands, reminders, who owed him, and random thoughts of the kind that are now tweefed into ether. We are really losing something, and it's far more than just photographs, and it is very very sad. There are very few men of letters left.

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Wow. That just needed to be re-iterated. Wow.

Allen Friday said:

In the past, negatives were filed away and prints went into an album. Either could be accessed when needed. With e-mailing photos and posting on line, more people see the photos when made, but I fear they will be lost because so few prints are made. How many photographers constantly update and back up old photos on the hard drive? Will they be readable in the future?

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You don't even need to go to that. How many people *organize* those files?

I got a digital about 2001 and used it a fair amount for 2-4 years. I have never deleted an image from disk (only on camera). I have them all somewhere. Can I find something specific? Probably not. Can anyone else find something (say, if I'm dead)? Highly unlikely.

Consider when it is a 20 year collection/accumulation.

Shoeboxes, deep end-table drawers -- that is where history survives.

DLawson said:

You don't even need to go to that. How many people *organize* those files?

I got a digital about 2001 and used it a fair amount for 2-4 years. I have never deleted an image from disk (only on camera). I have them all somewhere. Can I find something specific? Probably not. Can anyone else find something (say, if I'm dead)? Highly unlikely.

Consider when it is a 20 year collection/accumulation.

Shoeboxes, deep end-table drawers -- that is where history survives.

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Whist I don't disagree with you, there are "environmental" risks to film and transparencies. Take, for instance, my old Boxer bitch "Sooty".

In the mid-80's, after I'd been taking photos for 10+ years, I'd accumulated many thousands of slides, all neatly marked up in their boxes from Kodak, Fuji and Agfa. They were stored safely, or so I thought, stacked in a few shirt boxes in my living room which was definitely off-limits to "Sooty".

However, one Saturday morning I awoke at about 06:00 to hear a strange "crunching sound" coming from the top of the stairs, I exited my bedroom to find "Sooty" chomping away on what looked like a load of slides.

A double-take later I realised that they were slides and, to my horror, I found hundreds and hundreds scattered up and down the stairs, along the hallway and into the living room. In the living room itself was the main carnage. Virtually all the boxes had been bitten open emptied and the slides chewed or drooled over.

I rescued what few remained untouched and left the house. I didn't come back for 24 hours as I would have killed the dog - and I knew that wasn't the thing to do and that it would have upset my parents whose dog she really was and who lived with me at the time.

Whether I'd left the door open or my mother had done so inadvertently I'll never know. I just know that I lost the best and most memorable work I'd ever done. Today, I still have about 150 slides left from the thousands I had when this happened. I seldom look at them as I still get angry when I think of the loss.

I still use slides and film but I am extremely careful about storage. I don't have a dog anymore but I do have 4 very inquisitive cats.

When it comes to my digital work, I use Photoshop CS3 Extended and Photoshop Bridge. I'm not an expert user by any means but I can categorise the shots I take and file them using categories from location to subject to just about anything I can think of. I also have an external hard drive back up and I burn the ones I really want to keep to CD-Rom.

I've also bought an Epson scanner and intend creating a digified record of all my negatives so that I have a back up should the worst happen.

Aside from keeping duplicates off-site, on a remote server or in a fireproof safe, there is no way of guaranteeing 100% that one's work will survive into the future - irrespective of the medium.

My partner Barb became a grandma about 6 months ago. I shot some film of the new baby, and sent Barb's son and his wife some really nice 8X10 prints. Adam and Holly don't print anything. They look at pictures of their baby on the TV. They have two digital picture frames in their home. There is not a print to be found anywhere on display. That is just the way they prefer it. I have suitcases of prints going back to 1917 of family members. In ten years, I'll probably have the only pictorial record of baby Alma.

That crazy ol' Sooty!

Thankfully precious moments in world history will be preserved, even in this digital age. Magazines (at least for several more years) will get printed and the important things in time will be preserved and archived. Those images will also live on so many drives that their changes of being completely wiped out will be slim. Film sees a resurgence for certain subjects, so other things should be able to live on safely. As far as snap shots, they are as mentioned the most fragile as most of that stuff is digital based.

Redundancy is a solution but also a big problem in the digiworld. From the standpoint of archiving, redundancy might be considered a good thing, because chances are quite good that a file put on a server will survive even if that server crashes. But because of the inherent volatility of digital information, there is a lot of redundancy now... backups of backups... which in turn means an exploding demand for more storage space. memory will eventually become a commodity or perhaps even a currency!

Another aspect of redundancy that concerns me is 'proprietariness'... if that's a word... or image ownership if it's not. If one creates multiple backups on a remote server then the there is proportional risk that the file will eventually be widely accessible as open source. To fight that, one might encrypt the data, but then... encryption introduces more risk of corrupting the file or losing access to it in the future.

It's all a big problem and I'm sure it comes as no surprise to any of us that Fuji's brand new archival storage systems are based on film:

http://www.fujifilmusa.com/press/news/display_news?newsID=879745

While I agree with the original point (that without prints, most of the pictures snapped in digital will disappear), I have a different take on it than most posters. I think if you pointed that out to most people, they would be okay with it.

My friends are in their 40s and early 50s, so we are raising our own kids and inheriting with what our parents saved from our childhoods. I think most of us feel that there's almost too much stuff. If you have kids, you get a few prints a year even if you don't own a camera, between school and sports team photos. Many people also take their kids for annual portraits, and have prints made then. There are also prints made at significant family and religious events, like weddings, confirmations or bar and bat mitzvahs. That's enough for many people.

As for snapshots, well, most of my friends and family members use digital, and they are perfectly happy having a changing display of photos on their computer or digital frames. They are perfectly happy not to have every photo made into a print. They are sad, but not destroyed, when the computer crashes and the photos are lost.

When our parents downsize their homes, or pass away, we find all the prints saved from our parents' lives and our own childhoods. Most people scan a few old pictures, put a few in a drawer somewhere, and throw out the rest. So maybe that makes the impermanence of digital photos easier to accept. And as memories fade, family photos do become less valuable, simply because there's often no one who can identify them. My father-in-law, before he died of cancer, passed along to us his shoebox of old family photos. But he himself did not remember every person pictured. He often couldn't even tell which of his own children were in which photo -- was that Patrick or Jim, and was that David or cousin Mike?

It occurs to me that the whole vernacular photo thing is based on people thowing out photos, or abandoning them, and someone else buying them at garage sales or finding them in a dumpster. I guess what I'm trying to say is, at a certain point, it all becomes just stuff. And people feel they have too much stuff. Not everyone gets sentimental about every little picture. They keep professional photos. They have digital photos for as long as they have them. But they feel okay about not adding 50 or 500 prints per year.

-Laura

P.S. -- I am a photographer, so I love prints, but I'm not talking about myself here. I"m talking about the vast majority of people I know, who might be more representative of general opinion than I am.

In addition to the good points made by other people, remember that many people *do* routinely get prints of their d*g*t*l photos, dropping off their card as if it were a roll of film and getting an envelope of prints back. They're not fine-art prints, but neither were most people's C-41 drugstore 4x6s fine-art prints a few years ago; and for that matter, the inkjet prints may well have better longevity than the C-41 prints.

In many ways, I think the archival sky fell with the move from black and white to the shorter-lived C-41 for most people's family snapshots, not so much the switch to d*g*t*l.

-NT

darinwc said:

Examples:My parent have bags of old prints, but NO negatives.

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Same here. I recently made digital copies of some old family photos, with partial restoration, because some of those old prints are not in very good condition and can't be easily handled. I'm also scanning some slides from the 1970s that have faded somewhat. So film and prints are hardly perfect, mainly, like everything else, it depends a lot on how well you take care of things.

But what are the flea-market hounds of the future going to paw through? Boxes of old thumb drives? That doesn't sound like any fun.