Expired film

[MrAragorn]

http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=871609

Simply fantastic. At various room temperatures! than digital!
Try to retrieve images from a CD in 30 years!

 

[Thomas Bertilsson]

That's pretty cool. When digging through a camera collection recently, I found a roll of Kodak Verichrome Pan from the 1960s in one of the cameras.
I processed it in Xtol and developed it with lots of agitation to get good contrast, and the pictures came out surprisingly well!

The camera was a Zeiss Ikonta.

.

 

[keithwms]

Yup, some time ago I posted some shots here from panatomic x dated before my birth and they were fine. The film was stored at room temp. A bit of fog but no big deal. I've also used coated plates from the late 60s, they give low contrast but... kinda cool actually.

Anyway, you know, Fuji has a new archiving system based on film They know... everybody knows what the digital information is up against, in terms of long term keep. And now there is a big push in the US to digitize medical records- a good idea actually, from the standpoint of information access for clinicians, but what happens when records that somebody really needs simply vanish from the earth?

 

[Whiteymorange]

Awhile ago there was a story on NPR about the Smithsonian wrestling with how they might store images "forever." The decision, I kid you not, was to digitize them, save the data in machine language (zero's and ones) to avoid the problem of obsolete machines and operating systems, and print it all out on archival paper, stored in climate controlled conditions. One 8x10 image works out to many, many sheets of paper with zero's and ones on them. They figured it should be good for at least 500 years and could always be translated by a computer into a visual image. Funny, no one even suggested making a new print or negative of the image in traditional photography...

Too many little minds thinking too many little thoughts.

 

[Q.G.]

I think it's not wrong of them to think that neither negative nor print will last 500 years.

 

[removed account4]

that is really weird considering ( if i remember correctly )
the habs program suggests their images have a 500+ year shelf life ...

 

[Q.G.]

You missed the bit where they'll write the data on 'paper'.
We're still reading texts written thousands of years go, so good choice.

 

[steven_e007]

Awhile ago there was a story on NPR about the Smithsonian wrestling with how they might store images "forever." The decision, I kid you not, was to digitize them, save the data in machine language (zero's and ones) to avoid the problem of obsolete machines and operating systems, and print it all out on archival paper, stored in climate controlled conditions. One 8x10 image works out to many, many sheets of paper with zero's and ones on them. They figured it should be good for at least 500 years and could always be translated by a computer into a visual image.

I wonder who is going to have the job of typing them all back in, again? :rolleyes:

There are ancient scrolls around that have lasted for nearly 2000 years stored in burial chambers and holes in the ground. I can't see why an archival processed silver print stored in ideal conditions shouldn't last a lot longer than that...

 

[Niall Bell]

even IF the world survives 2012, even in 30 years,

..

What's going to happen in 2012? As far as I know the EU carbon Emissions Trading Scheme becomes more onerous then, but that's about it. Or is this some religous reference?

Niall

 

[w9cae]

I love old out of date film. Got a load of Ilford B&W bulk from my brother. He purchased in the late 1970's. I have been developing in 1 to 100 Rodinol & the grain has been reduced. Others especially younger digital users love the grain which they call noise. Found an old roll of Agfa that had Walgreens branding which I think I bought in 1995. Then it got lost & somehow found its way with me to Australia. Where I shot & then got developed. I wish I had a truck load of that film. Old out of date can sometimes be a great find.

 

[Q.G.]

I wonder who is going to have the job of typing them all back in, again? :rolleyes:

I think it would be fair to expect that in 500 years time, they will have developed a machine that you can feed sheets of paper into, which the machine then reads, turning what it read into some form of in-computer notation.
They might call it, oh i don't know..., a "scanner", or something equally imaginative.

 

[Thomas Bertilsson]

A smart way to do it would be to document art work digitally, and save them in three backup-copies on separate hard drives or servers.
A librarian or system operator then opens each file intermittently and re-saves them in three copies and deletes the old records. This way you rotate the saved data, making sure you can open them on a regular basis. If any file transfer has to be done from old to new, then you can re-save in the new format when you migrate.

It's a lot of work and manual labor, but conservation usually is. Unless you shoot it on film and store it in a shoe box in grandpa's attic, of course. This is fool proof and those photos will last for generations. We know this to be true.

 

[Worker 11811]

There are ancient scrolls around that have lasted for nearly 2000 years stored in burial chambers and holes in the ground. I can't see why an archival processed silver print stored in ideal conditions shouldn't last a lot longer than that...

We also have pottery that is 2,000+ years old. We also have iron and other metal objects that are even older than that.

Why not use photogravure? Engrave the image on metal or glass. To reproduce it, simply apply ink and impress on paper. It's a process that can be taught to high school students. I'd think that scientists 1,000 years in the future could figure out how to do it.

If you don't want to go to all that trouble, why not use a traditional photograph and encapsulate it in argon like they have done with the Declaration of Independence? They don't have to go to all that trouble. Just two sheets of archival glass in a soldered frame would do. Wouldn't it?

 

[Q.G.]

Indeed.
And that's the Achilles heel: what you freeze and preserve for ever is not just the image, but also todya's state of scanning art.
And as ever with copies, once the original is lost, you only have, well... a copy. Perhaps printing tecnology in 400+ years time will be very, very good. But it will still be an approximation of what the original was (i.e. not a machineprint, for starters).

But you're wrong that you need computers to read the above. I can.
And with the patience once displayed by scribes copying ancient texts by hand, i could turn the above into an image too. Manually.
All i need is to know how to map the lines of code to a place on a bit of paper (or whatever), know how to translate the code to values, and put a brush into the appropriate pot of paint and put a dot of the correct colour and tone in the right place.
Lots of work. But that's not difficult. It's easy!

 

[Q.G.]

Why not use photogravure? Engrave the image on metal or glass. To reproduce it, simply apply ink and impress on paper. It's a process that can be taught to high school students. I'd think that scientists 1,000 years in the future could figure out how to do it.

Because what is lost and added in turning an image into a plate will be conserved forever.
The idea of translating the actual image using a code that describes the image itself without adding the characteristics of another medium to the coded representation is good.
Yet flawed, because you run the image through a scanner to turn it into a code, so whatever that scanner doesn't record or adds will be embedded in the representation.
Though that's something you run into, can't get round, no matter what way of reading you choose, one way is better than another.

If you don't want to go to all that trouble, why not use a traditional photograph and encapsulate it in argon like they have done with the Declaration of Independence? They don't have to go to all that trouble. Just two sheets of archival glass in a soldered frame would do. Wouldn't it?

Would it?

Preserving (physical) originals is always best, as far as authenticity is concerned.
But physical thingies can get destroyed. No matter how careful you are, nothing lasts forever.
"Information" is a lot sturdier.

The 'paper' on which the code will be written is another of those physical things. So it basically offers no better chance of survival than the original image.
Yet it's so much easier to make loads of (hopefully redundant) copies of a coded representation than of an original, because all you have to copy is the information content, and not the way it looks, feels, tastes, etc.

 

[Worker 11811]

I see what you are saying.

My thought came from reading a story, several years ago, about the way the U.S. Library of Congress was trying to preserve it's collection of sound recordings. I remember that they were using some form of etched glass disk. Basically, that's a funky form of photogravure. Right? That's what gave me the idea.

There has been a big push to preserve and restore the Declaration of Independence because it was starting to deteriorate pretty badly. They had to go through great lengths to fix it up and then figure out methods to keep it safe. The story I understand is that, when it was written, it was taken on tour around the country where every Tom, Dick and Harry could look at it and put his paws all over it. So, many of its problems started early in life and we are now having to remediate all of that damage before we can carry out the rest of the preservation. Thus, it is my thought that, if somebody started out with a good, clean photograph made with sound archival practices in mind then encapsulated it in an inert atmosphere like they did (or are doing) with the Declaration of Independence, it would be easy to preserve for the long term. If the Declaration can survive for 230+ years after practically being trampled on for the first 100, a well-maintained photograph should be able to survive for 500 standing on its head, so to speak.

If you want to be a deconstructionist, isn't a photograph just an encoded image as well? Isn't the print a duplicate of the negative's encoded information? Isn't information lost in the translation from negative to print, anyway? Sure, a photogravure is merely a copy of an original coded image but I see it as a good quality copy of the original image which will not easily degrade because it is a hard, inert surface which will not easily degrade just from age which can be easily reproduced even using rudimentary methods. I could conceivably reprint a photgravure from a glass or metal plate in my basement.

Secondarily, if I was preserving photographs for the ages so that some future civilization could retrieve and view them I would also store the originals, regardless of the method I used for preservation. I would make the proposed photogravure, produce a print of that then store that print, its plate and the original negative used to produce it along with as much documentation as I could reasonably produce and package all of that together in one container (or series of containers) so that future historians could understand what I did and why.

The trick would be making the engraving with enough detail to produce a quality image that would last long enough to be retrieved. I do agree with you. It is probably better to produce a good, archival print then carefully store it away and hope it doesn't get damaged somewhere down the line.

 

[Q.G.]

I don't share the belief that a photograph will last 500 years. Maybe in about 400 years from now i will let myself be convinced that they can, but now, i doubt it.

Yes, a photograph is an encoded representation of something else. The question thus is what the thing is that the museum wants preserved.
If the photograph itself, anything that adds its own peculiarities, like photogravures do, would be moving away from, instead of preserving, the original.
And it can be argued that a written out scan does that too. You quite simply can't preserve an original other than by preserving the original itself. So good point.

I wouldn't expect that the museum would think that once the written out scan is available, preserving the original is no longer important. On the contrary: to attempt to preserve it through such means is to show how important they think it is to preserve the original.
It also shows that there is little confidence that the original will keep as long as desired. And that's fair, considering that an original can get stolen, destroyed in a calamity of some sort, or get lost (forever) in a number of other ways besides not ageing very well.

The written out scan can be copied as often and as many times as you like without any loss in information, so it would be much safer.
And if (!) the original wouldn't age well, there will be a point in time sooner or later in which whatever you can reproduce using the coded copies will be better than the original in the state it is in then.
So if (again) the original would get worse with age, the fact that what you can reproduce using the copy isn't as good as the original the day it was copied would no longer be that much of a point.

But still: doing the utmost to keep the original in the state it is in now would be the best thing to do by far.

 

[Worker 11811]

I don't know if a photo will survive 500 years but I'd like to remain optimistic. Ink on parchment can survive hundreds of years. It's only been since 1940 or 1950 that anybody even thought about preserving the Declaration beyond putting it in a frame. I would really like to see how well an argon-encapsulated photo will hold up. I don't know but I bet it could do more than 230.

I know photogravure isn't a perfect method but it's the only thing that I can think of which can encode an image, will remain human-readable, is easily reproducible and, if properly cared for, can be virtually impervious to degradation and damage. Encoding as digital "1s" and "0s" then printing out on paper isn't nearly as robust. It's still ink on paper. All the frailties of paper still apply. You still have to store them with just as much care. Plus, if people in the future can't figure out how to decode all those digits and retrieve the photo, all your work will be for nothing.

For all the technology we have today, I think it would be possible to use lasers and other things to produce a high quality engraving on glass, metal or even a slab of silicon with enough detail to faithfully capture the original. What about some kind of imbibation/dye-transfer process using polyester film? Properly stored, polyester is pretty stable. Isn't it? I only thought of glass because I read about it being used in other preservation projects. Plus, I think it's robust enough to last for centuries if protected.

Unless there is a compelling reason, the original document should always be preserved even if copied. The copies are best stored apart from the original, as well. If one gets damaged the other should survive. One of the only things I can think of which shouldn't be preserved is nitrocellulose film which isn't somehow significant. In that case, the way to go is to make two copies of the original and incinerate the nitrate film. Historic and/or culturally significant movies and photographs would, of course, be excepted. In that case, we go back to duplication and separate storage. (The original would be stored in a nitrate-safe film vault.)

 

[mattmoy_2000]

In the V&A museum in London, there is a copy (made from plaster casts) of Trajan's Column. It is in a better state than the original (it was stored indoors; the original was damaged by acid rain and other pollution in Rome) and was used to help restore the original.
This perfectly illustrates Q.G.'s point about making replicas (although I think they should have tried harder to protect the original column...)

 

[cmacd123]

The limit of course is how any representaion is designed to hold all the detail of the original.

A friend of mine asked me to see if I had any images of our old neighbourhood. One of the building there, CJOH TV suffered a fire recently. when we were kids, we walked by the place all the time.

I made some prints on 5X7 RC VC paper. and then scanned them at 300 DPI in so I could post them on Facebook. I got curious about a couple of Pictures and scanned parts at 1200DPI.

Scan from 5X7

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=30614713&l=717070489a&id=1573530156

Detail

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=30614716&l=0de2e43496&id=1573530156

There are some marks that are part of the scanning process.