A reawakening to film?

Murray Kelly · Oct 22, 2009

In today's 'The Australian' newspaper the following article.
Dead Link Removed
my daughter drew my attention to it. Pretty well says what we all 'know' or suspect. How long will digital images last?
Murray

Slixtiesix · Oct 22, 2009

Very interesting story indeed. Thanks for sharing!

Jeff Kubach · Oct 22, 2009

Excellant article. Thanks Murray!

Jeff

werra · Oct 22, 2009

Well, the fragility of digital content and need for dedicated equipment to display it is the reason I came back to film, after my son was born.

benjiboy · Oct 22, 2009

This is an excellent article and very true when I look at my own family photographs.

polyglot · Oct 22, 2009

Eh, maybe. Most people don't understand how to preserve anything, digital or analogue. If you can say "but my toned FB prints will live for a millennium!", you're in the vanishingly small minority of people who know what they're doing.

Digital has likewise got a few people who know what they're doing. People who use RAID and offsite backups and actually make use of the fact that you can make an infinite number of lossless generations of copies - their photos will last as well as any FB print, will never be stolen or lost in a fire or flood. As the web gets more prominent in people's lives, I suspect that there's a lot of history that will live on in flickr and similar sites and while having that stuff held by a private corporation is a bad, bad idea, there are more open, distributed and fail-safe solutions starting to take shape, at least in universities.

Can you guess my PhD had something to do with distributed filesystems? My prediction is that within a decade or so, what people refer to as "cloud" or "grid" computing will start to become more of a reality than the buzzword that it is now and reliable long-term archival of data will become available to the general public. Photos will probably be one of the first things to go on there.

At the moment though, Joe-six-pack with the one copy of his photos on one hard drive or CD-ROM? They'll be lost irretrievably soon, just like C-41 negs and Ektacolor prints.

wclark5179 · Oct 22, 2009

I see no clear cut answers that make one medium "better" than the other. As a professional photographer, I remember that, during the film only days, very few included negatives with clients purchases. Even if it was done and medium and/or large format equipment was used, very few, if any, retail facilities could print from these negatives. It was the pro labs job.

The challenge with preserving images in print form is dealing with the life of a color print. B&W prints can last a long time but color I find is another story. This depends on several factors including where they are displayed, if the sun rises on the wall of the prints what will happen to them?

When pro photographers started using 35mm film then the situation changed and some wanted and some gave into clients wishes to obtain the negatives.

With digital this is getting more common, at least I hear about it from various meetings I attend with pro photographers. One consequence of this is the decline of print sales for the pro. The other is that now the client has a disk and they can obtain prints on their own, can get various quality levels depending on who prints the files and the equipment used. The client can preserve the files in various ways, if they take the time to think about that aspect of those files on the disk. This is good and it can be bad, depending on the client.

With film, when I reviewed the images with a client and when they picked out one for a large print and I had a re-touch artist work on the negative how many copies of that one negative did I have just in case?

So now we have multiple copies of every digital file in house & files stored off site, and we "feel" it isn't as safe as film or prints? How about if a fire takes place where the negatives are stored? Did you copy them?

Nothing lasts forever.

Murray Kelly · Oct 22, 2009

Mate, nobody is talking millenia. I wish it were so, but short of oils and egg based media one can only doubt that photography would last so long!

OTOH I have been thru several existences of 'digital' and all were found wanting, 'time wise'.

Since photography is so recent nobody can claim eternal life for the medium. It has, however, proven long lasting in the silver / paper association.

I don't know about your PhD but my MD gets me a lot of interpersonal, down to earth, insights as to the value of a photo from 100 years ago of family history. There is a deep gut feeling when looking at images of one's family from a century ago, and I agree with the columnist that unless there is a fail free system (like a paper print) digital has to prove itself.
Murray

polyglot said:
Eh, maybe. Most people don't understand how to preserve anything, digital or analogue. If you can say "but my toned FB prints will live for a millennium!", you're in the vanishingly small minority of people who know what they're doing.

Digital has likewise got a few people who know what they're doing. People who use RAID and offsite backups and actually make use of the fact that you can make an infinite number of lossless generations of copies - their photos will last as well as any FB print, will never be stolen or lost in a fire or flood. As the web gets more prominent in people's lives, I suspect that there's a lot of history that will live on in flickr and similar sites and while having that stuff held by a private corporation is a bad, bad idea, there are more open, distributed and fail-safe solutions starting to take shape, at least in universities.

Can you guess my PhD had something to do with distributed filesystems? My prediction is that within a decade or so, what people refer to as "cloud" or "grid" computing will start to become more of a reality than the buzzword that it is now and reliable long-term archival of data will become available to the general public. Photos will probably be one of the first things to go on there.

At the moment though, Joe-six-pack with the one copy of his photos on one hard drive or CD-ROM? They'll be lost irretrievably soon, just like C-41 negs and Ektacolor prints.

Morry Katz · Oct 22, 2009

Thanks for the link, Murray. It's an excellent article. Digital has two major flaws: the degradation of the storage media and the obsolescence of the retrieval equipment. Old negatives print easily.
Morry Katz - Lethbridge Canada

Murray Kelly · Oct 22, 2009

Morry Katz said:
Thanks for the link, Murray. It's an excellent article. Digital has two major flaws: the degradation of the storage media and the obsolescence of the retrieval equipment. Old negatives print easily.
Morry Katz - Lethbridge Canada

Thanx Morry but the bottom line is how long will silver images last? My suspicion is - a very long time - like centuries? Let me know if I'm wrong.
Murray

Rudeofus · Oct 22, 2009

wclark5179 said:
The challenge with preserving images in print form is dealing with the life of a color print. B&W prints can last a long time but color I find is another story. This depends on several factors including where they are displayed, if the sun rises on the wall of the prints what will happen to them?

While their quality decreases, there is still something there which can be recovered. Scanning a faded print and fixing color and contrast can get decent results if needed. This is different in the purely digital world:

Hardware failure: If a hard disk breaks, most of the time its contents are lost forever. Disk failure happens a lot more often than fire in residential buildings. Even a bad RAM module can screw up a file system.

Bit rot: If a file format falls out of favour, chances are that most image readers won't support it after several years. And it's not just the individual file format: I went from iPhoto to digiKam, and it is a real pain to just move my old pics from the iPhoto repository without using iPhoto (which in turn doesn't exist under linux)

Data flood: The sheer volume of digital photos prevents most amateurs from actually storing them on their computer, they just leave them on their camera until they need more space. Don't even think about backups ... Shooting 100 digital pics in one day is easy, maintaining any kind of organizational scheme over all of them is a lot of work. So an image might be on your hard disk, but who would find it among 10000 images?

wclark5179 said:
When pro photographers started using 35mm film then the situation changed and some wanted and some gave into clients wishes to obtain the negatives.

You don't need a perfect quality high res image to preserve a memory for a lost relative. Most people are perfectly happy with copies made from 7x10cm prints if that's all that's available. It's about memories, not about magazine covers or bill boards.

wclark5179 said:
With digital this is getting more common, at least I hear about it from various meetings I attend with pro photographers. One consequence of this is the decline of print sales for the pro. The other is that now the client has a disk and they can obtain prints on their own, can get various quality levels depending on who prints the files and the equipment used. The client can preserve the files in various ways, if they take the time to think about that aspect of those files on the disk. This is good and it can be bad, depending on the client.

This is certainly true from a professional view, but I think the main point of this thread is pics shot by people themselves: holiday pics, family gatherings, kids. That's where so many memories are created and it's those images which most likely won't see the next decade for the reasons I stated above

wclark5179 said:
How about if a fire takes place where the negatives are stored? Did you copy them?

I have never had a fire in any place I lived in but sure witnessed lots of data disappearing for good from hardware failures and bit rot.

rtuttle · Oct 22, 2009

What most people will become painfully aware of is that all hard disks crash. They are rated "mean time between failures". That failure is your data. So backing up becomes a must. The problem there is what to back up on? CD? That's great for today but what about in a few years? Who has data on a zip, syquest, jazz, floppy or other removable disk? When you get a new computer sometimes the data bus is different. I personally own a jazz, syquest and zip that I can't hook up to my new computer as they are SCSI interfaces and the new computer is Firewire or USB 2.0. So when the information on those needs to be updated you need to hook both machines together via a network or similar interface. I think what most people seem forget is this must be done forever into the future or all your images (and other data) will be lost. The average "Joe Sixpack" as he was referenced here (I usually use Soccer Mom myself) is not going to do this forever. So what everyone has to come to grips with is that from here on out there is going to be a huge loss of personal (and professional) data. There is no way around it. I work in the graphic arts and have store my data and when things change I have to update my back ups. I have also had back up disks die, leaving everything on the disk unusable. It happens more then you think, especially with store purchased CDR's.

However personally my Mom gave me negatives that were every bit 80+ years old a few years back and I was able to print those in my darkroom without any difficulty. She was happy as was a few relatives. Jump forward 80 and imagine giving someone a cd or zip disk with pictures of grandma on it. Consider them lost!

Ektagraphic · Oct 22, 2009

How very true. I know a few people that had thousands of family photos of their kids growing up that are now history...

Prest_400 · Oct 22, 2009

polyglot said:
Eh, maybe. Most people don't understand how to preserve anything, digital or analogue. If you can say "but my toned FB prints will live for a millennium!", you're in the vanishingly small minority of people who know what they're doing.

At the moment though, Joe-six-pack with the one copy of his photos on one hard drive or CD-ROM? They'll be lost irretrievably soon, just like C-41 negs and Ektacolor prints.

People don't understand or care about the best archival medium they can use.

A relative and I were talking this afternoon. He wants to buy a SD videocam. From the SD to computer, to CD. He did have a 8-tape camera. I commented him, that he should pass the old tapes to a newer format.
Somehow we started to talk about archival stuff. He said "Bah, with a CD is archival enough, your film photos will also dissapear; your great-grandsons won't care about photos or anything else. When you'll pass away, your great-grandsons won't know who you were and they'll throw the photographs away."
I stared at him, and didn't know what to say. I do photography for enjoyment, I like to photograph the life, and pass it to the future; I consider that a photograph has to last.

Craig Swensson · Oct 22, 2009

quote

interpersonal, down to earth, insights as to the value of a photo from 100 years ago of family history. There is a deep gut feeling when looking at images of one's family from a century ago, and I agree with the columnist that unless there is a fail free system (like a paper print) digital has to prove itself.

This IS the point, cloud,grid,bit rot,data flood ,SD blah,blah are relevant to an absolut minority, but not the point.
There is absolutely a difference in taking time to sit with your children/family looking at prints in an album than yelling ` hey kids come and look at this photo of gran', on the computer.

Iwagoshi · Oct 22, 2009

rtuttle said:
I have also had back up disks die, leaving everything on the disk unusable. It happens more then you think, especially with store purchased CDR's.

This is common knowledge among the rip-n-burn crowd on the audio boards. Some anecdotal examples show CDR dyes fading within five years, depending on the storage/handling methods. And I guess everyone knows that Sharpies are CDR killers.

Besides, if it is not quite literally carved in stone it's lost, and all bets are off after 2012.

lns · Oct 22, 2009

No one here agrees with me, but I really think that most people do realize that their digital photos are no more archival than their college term papers that vanished long ago on the junked hard drive that used to run MS-DOS. I think most people accept that not every photo will survive. They are okay with that. Really. Nearly all my friends are soccer moms and dads. They do make the occasional print, so there's that. But even more fundamentally, they really feel they have too many photos anyway. I have no sense at all that they would return to film for archival reasons. Though interestingly, many really did prefer the film process and film results. For the average person, film is just much more convenient, because you shoot it, bring in the roll and someone else does all the work. I'm serious about that -- if I were in the film business, I'd sell it as a convenience product, like takeout meals at the supermarket.

-Laura

Ian David · Oct 22, 2009

Thanks for the link Murray - I missed that article in my browse of the Australian.
It is interesting to me, as I have just starting scanning some of the many old photos in my Mum's albums. Mum has about 25 photo albums, meticulously maintained, going back to her parents' infancy. But there is only one copy of all these photos, so I thought I would at least get scans of a few dozen that mean the most to me...
I agree that, with the advent of digital, there are a lot fewer photos printed out and stored, but I also agree with Laura above that attitudes have changed as well, starting before the time of digital.
In my parents' post-war lives, everything was precious to them and care was taken with everything. Photos were precious, many were carefully processed, and then they were stored in albums. Now, many people view nothing as precious. Money is plentiful, convenience is king, everything can be replaced, and tomorrow is another universe. This trend is well exemplified in digital technology, but started before then. (Incidentally, many of the photos in my Mum's albums from the 70s and 80s are colour and badly fading already.)
I don't think many people care very much that most of their digital photos may be lost forever. They may care later on, but not now.
I care, but then I still shoot film, have my own darkroom setup, and am thus a bit of a dinosaur.
Interesting but not surprising that Salt's article did not suggest that people consider a return to film use.

Dave in Kansas · Oct 22, 2009

This so-called convenience factor of film needs the proper marketing spin on it to make it seem like the way to go. The stores are what need to push film because that gets people into their establishment twice, once to drop off the film and again when they pick it up, so double the chance to make a retail sale on something else.

My wife has discovered the convenience of uploading an image from her computer to the local drug store so she only has to go one time to pick it up. To her, that is more convenient.

I do think that for the most part, these new D cameras give the average user a better snapshot than they used to get with their film camera 15 or 20 years ago. The problem is, most don't get printed. Many people are short sighted too and think if they have something for 5 or 10 years, that is a long time.

As for me, I'm sticking with film and have invested in more and better equipment in the past year and have been shooting much more film than 5 years ago. My life is busy enough without worrying about backing up data files. Shoe boxes work pretty darn well.

Dave

Iwagoshi · Oct 22, 2009

Laura, funny that you should mention it but I just found some of my term papers in the back of a file cabinet, typed double-space, single-sided, with some rather flattering comments (in red) on the cover.

IMO the lack of mass market hard drives are saving film. As evident from the 23-minute film-to-print shop I found in a small Tokyo suburb, where PCs are not prevalent.
BTW the shop also makes prints for SD/CF cards, but don't tell anyone.

michaelbsc · Oct 23, 2009

Prest_400 said:
... He said "Bah, with a CD is archival enough, your film photos will also dissapear; your great-grandsons won't care about photos or anything else. When you'll pass away, your great-grandsons won't know who you were and they'll throw the photographs away."...

You're relative is a wise, if somewhat cold hearted, person. Somewhere around this site someone else made the observation that the llikelyhood of an image's survival had nothing to do with the medium and everything to do with the desirability of the image.

I dare say the Ansel Adams and Edwin Weston's pictures will still be around centuries from now, but I fear all of mine will get pitched out after no one wants them at the estate sale.

The best I can truly hope for is that some young kid will somehow wind up with a decent camera out of my junk and start his own pathway to enlightenment.

Pooh says, "Take pictures to help *YOU* understand. Don't take pictures for posterity."

MB

Mark Antony · Oct 23, 2009

Michael, that's quite a narrow view, I take pictures for a variety of reasons, some aesthetic but very definitely some for posterity. It may be true that a photo's survival may be down to it's desirability, but that in no way excludes ones of our families, friends and immediate environments.
Recently my grandmother died aged 88, after her funeral relatives looked though her metal victorian hatbox full of photos and negs in wallets.
In this box were several pictures of my grandparents courtship, the first radio out in the garden on a table cloth, my grandfather going to war etc.
The media was easy to access because it was printed, everyone gathered round passing images and older ones remembering and passing on those memories.
It made me think of my current situation and how I archive my images, mostly in printed form and albums, but some in online storage very important ones in both.
My main point is this:
When I die few people will want to fire up my laptop to look at the family shots, if I was killed today I doubt my wife would even know about my online stuff, the CD/DVD and HD media will just be silver shiny clutter in my office to be disposed of, but I firmly believe that the photo albums in our library bookshelves will provide easy low tech access for years to come.

Its all about ease of access, and printing is the only way to ensure everyone has that.
Mark

ricksplace · Oct 23, 2009

I have some negatives that are close to 100 years old. They are from the British army when they were in India. They print just fine. I have a picture of my grandfather sitting astride his harley in 1917. I made a print of it and framed it with a shot of my daughter sitting astride her ZX7R ninja. The facial similarities are stiking. The pair of shots get a lot of comments from my daughter's friends. Great Grampa in full military uniform sitting on a harley that would be worth it's weight in gold now, and Stephanie sitting on her gold (yellow) ninja. Very cool.

JBrunner · Oct 23, 2009

The thing I always look to is that the preservation of digital media requires an active ongoing maintenance, both in time and dollars. What will be preserved is what somebody deems as important now. This unavoidably edits our history, with that pretentious ideal at the forefront. Many things would have been considered groundbreaking in the future will be lost, while what was popular may exist through sheer volume. The chances someone will find the files some brilliant young street urchin is snapping today in 150 years are next to nothing. In essence, one method has passive archivability, and the other is demanding. All technologies have advantages and disadvantages. What really needs to be championed is the print, no matter how it is arrived at. Decent prints in any media are now few and far between, because images have sadly become synonymous with the idea of photography. The print is the art and history we are really losing.

michaelbsc · Oct 23, 2009

Mark Antony said:
Michael, that's quite a narrow view...

Mark,

Perhpas we should move to the philosophy section!

I agree with everything you say, but I come to the conclusion that taking pictures for me without regard to posterity is extremely liberating rather than restricting. I do the best I can to make what is *GOOD RIGHT NOW* instead of what might be considered good for posterity.

I'm sure Pooh was enlightened.

Michael

A reawakening to film?

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