I do the darkroom ceremony, as I always have except for the odd roll of colour negative and print. I feel that not doing so makes me somewhat diminished as a photographer.
More worrying is the history that has a strong likelihood of being lost via the well discussed accessibility of digital formats in future.
I asked my daughter, who works in Fairfax's photo section about the classification and archiving of the images currently on show at the State Library of NSW and she said that it was a mess, the State Library--with its careful archival regimen--doesn't acquire the master copies, and I guess that Fairfax, by definition a daily newspaper, just stacks them up somewhere out of the way.
I worked on a TV doco many years ago, which sought historical footage. The material we needed was the everyday life of the community and this was the very stuff that had been dumped. Politicians and other pompous types abounded, but the images that once were processed by the equivalents of the local minlab were long gone.
Regards - Ross
