Think Negatively: Shoot film: a veteran imaging journalist's unexpected plug for film

In the The Age comes this surprising statement from Terry Lane, who everybody knows is quite the antagonist in his relentless embracement of all things digital. Now it seems he's discovered something, albeit light years behind the rest of us. A refreshing piece all the same.

And who was the first company to introduce cloud storage? Why of course, good old Eastman Kodak! And he states customers can still access files they posted up. Wonders never cease...

http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/cameras/think-negatively-20121024-284jj.html#ixzz2Ar6dLaMq

"So, if eternal life and perpetual accessibility are your requirements, use film."

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/cameras/think-negatively-20121024-284jj.html#ixzz2AurcQ3W2

How unique.

God only knows how many family images that my wife and I have lost to the vagaries of digital hiccups. More than I care to count. But all the negatives from all the film I have ever shot are still available, and can still be read. Of course, most of what we have shot over the past several years, digital and film, may be best lost to time and memory, I don't know. However, I know which of the two has the best odds of being around in 20 years in my house.

Kodak's new film is designed for archiving digital movies:

[url]http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/kodak-new-film-archiving-365125[/URL]

And they have been selling systems for backing digital data to microfilm for some time:
Digital data to microfilm archive writers
Digital images to microfilm archive writers

"COM" - "Computer Output Microfilm" has been around for a half century for archiving records and for human-readable microfiche.
http://www.archives.nysed.gov/a/records/mr_pub52.pdf

And of course it also goes the other way - OCR readers that convert microfilm to digital data
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microform

Archiving data to film, er Daguerrotype plates, dates to 1839...

The idea that digital/magnetic media isn't archival but film is is well established.

The advantage to cloud storage to me is.. It's NOT in your house and is run on dual server backups...

So if your house burns down, the images won't be lost, can't say that about film...

I think it's best to just use all possible medium to store images for safe keeping, I have a working disk and a backup disk, and keep some of my portfolio on cloud (admittedly not much and all in jpg) though I'm cheap and haven't paid for storage since its honestly not big enough for my backup needs, my current files are just over a terabyte and growing... That doesn't include all the film images I'm about to scan when my epson comes in...




~Stone

The Noteworthy Ones - Mamiya: 7 II, RZ67 Pro II / Canon: 1V, AE-1 / Kodak: No 1 Pocket Autographic, No 1A Pocket Autographic

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