I couldn't agree more...

Quote from the "50 things to improve your life" article in the latest issue of monocle magazine:

Nr.34) Properly documented memories. Photos that last.
"While most of us have become converts to capturing treasured moments on smartphones, it's time to stop. Increasingly, years of images documenting parties, travel and riotous moments are being lost when iPhones are left in cabs or BlackBerries implode. The moment has come to buy a proper camera (a Fuji Natura) and start investing in high quality prints."

I've been thinking this exact same thing every time I see my friends post photos taken with instagram on facebook that I KNOW they will be kicking themselves 20 years from now for not using a real camera.

Ken

The "real camera" can be left in a cab too. Likewise, an iPhone photo can be printed. The problem isn't loss of the capture device, it's loss of the (sometimes only) media that stores the image. You can lose negatives too, for that matter, but are unlikely to leave them in a cab.

I tend to prefer what are often nowadays called "single purpose devices" myself, and not just for photography, rather than things that do many functions relatively poorly and are optimized for none, but the problem with digital photos in general and phone photos in particular being relatively ephemeral isn't due to the capture device, or even the storage media really, since they can be and should be backed up; the problem is with overload. We just take so many images, because it's so quick, easy, and in the case of our phones always with us, that we esteem none of them highly and aren't careful to preserve them.

amsp said:

I've been thinking this exact same thing every time I see my friends post photos taken with instagram on facebook that I KNOW they will be kicking themselves 20 years from now for not using a real camera.

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I'm not sure. I wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of data protection scandal with Facebook in the near future - our pictures will always be on someone's hard disk, somewhere. Plus, there's always someone lurking about ready to use your embarrasing party photos for these purposes - http://c.cslacker.com/2870l.jpg. Important point missed though: images on Facebook aren't about photography, they're just the most efficient way of getting you social brownie points. Prints would only slow down the validation process. In short, they serve a fleeting purpose, they aren't the purpose so these people will never be kicking themselves about the quality of their photographs. 'Memories' shouldn't be read as 'resolution' either. It's difficult, but sometimes you have to see outside the box as a 'fine art' or professional photographer and learn to differentiate between different intent and ultimate use of images today. Otherwise you'll be constantly pissed off at everyone!

I think the problem lies in the fact that although many use digital cameras and a computer, relatively few - especially among the older generations - would learn to really understand how the machines work. Most computer users are not really aware that there is a hard disk inside it. They know somewhere the image or file is registered in some "memory".

I see my parents, my aunts and their relation to computers. They use the bare minimum. They have no "backup" concept. Nor they keep their pictures in any ordered way. Nor can I try to put order in the mess, as they wouldn't be able any more to find what they look for. Too many clicks. The concept of "directory" is often quite a nuisance for many. Imagine incremental back-ups.

By the same token I suspect that users of smart phones or tablets are not necessarily so smart as their devices. Yes they might flush their memory to a computer, but without organization all the pictures will be lost in a few years in the mare magnum. I think backing up is a minority concern.

It's not so much the possibility to forget your phone in a cab that worries me, it's the fact that people are using crappy low resolution phones in the first place to document many of their most important memories, and many times they use apps like instagram to degrade the quality even further. I for one am extremely thankful that most of my own life and my parents' before that is recorded on negatives. I can look at the prints (something I rarely do for my digital pics) and I can make new ones, or even scan them and with today's technology get even more quality out of them than was possible when they were originally made.

Unfortunately I learned the hard way how things can easily go wrong with digital when about 8 years ago I went to study abroad (some of the best years of my life) and made the bad decision to not only use a shitty p&s digital to record my memories but also lost all of these in a HD failure at the end of my stay a couple of years later. All I have left are a handful of web-sized files that were uploaded to a server for sharing. Nowadays of course I make rigorous backups, but I would guess most people don't. Still, even if I hadn't lost them I wish I would have recorded those years on film. As the years pass you treasure your memories more and more, and I can only imagine how people in 20 years will regret recording theirs with a crappy cellphone, not to mention future generations. I don't expect people to start buying film cameras really, but at the very least get a quality digital.

amsp said:

I can only imagine how people in 20 years will regret recording theirs with a crappy cellphone, not to mention future generations.

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I'm really not sure they will, in the same way that people didn't regret not 'recording their memories' before the invention of commercial film. People use the technology readily available to them at the time - then namely paintings or sketches. When Kodak arrived did these people look back to when the daguerreotype/calotype (like film today) was a niche product and regret not travelling to England or France for the 'real deal'? I'm sure they carried on getting their paintings made and were happy for what the impression of the paintings evoked. I'm not too comfortable with the idea of 'recording memories' - where will it end - with a chip inside our heads?

Huh, a lot of unfounded "We" in this thread. I find the prints I get from my iPhone4 to be stellar, even have a 30" x 30" of a scene in New Orleans in Hipstamatic on my wall, looks killer. I also have a lot of backup, a pelican case filled with 3TB drives that comes home from my buddy's place once a week for an update, sets of DVD's at my mom's house a thousand miles away...

I know plenty of people who pre-digital, filled the albums with 4x6's only to either lose or toss out the negatives...in some ways this is nothing new. You either care about the photos you made or you do not, technology has less to do with this than you might think.

I hate some of this digital crap. Today my wife asked me to take a portrait of her for some form she needed to complete and so I used her digital camera. When I pressed the shutter it whirred, bleeped and flashed and about ½ second later took the picture. What sort of camera is that? When I press the shutter I expect immediate response. A camera like that destroys the whole intention of what I am trying to do.

I use everything from 8x10 to hipstamatic. They all have their place.

cliveh said:

I hate some of this digital crap. Today my wife asked me to take a portrait of her for some form she needed to complete and so I used her digital camera. When I pressed the shutter it whirred, bleeped and flashed and about ½ second later took the picture. What sort of camera is that? When I press the shutter I expect immediate response. A camera like that destroys the whole intention of what I am trying to do.

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Well, at least you didn't have to coat the plate first... ;-)

As already mentioned, everything has its place. My oldest cam, a 100 year old Kodak brownie box camera that still gets used. My newest, a Lytro light field camera. Rather box shaped in its own right, no shutter lag, no wait for focusing. What once was old, is new again. My favorite, at the moment, a Busch Pressman C. Why? I rather like all the "drama" and fiddling that goes into making an image with it. As a result, I'm pretty sure I have the largest collection of flashbulbs on my block.

cliveh said:

Today my wife asked me to take a portrait of her for some form she needed to complete and so I used her digital camera. When I pressed the shutter it whirred, bleeped and flashed and about ½ second later took the picture.

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I think it is very unusual that we have all this technology, but that slow capture is the current "norm".

Just as I think it is unusual that I can launch a web browser and wait for several moments for the "opportunity" to type a web page into the address bar.

These defects are pervasive, and my hope for the future generation is... they will have plenty of jobs writing improved software that does all this better.