Why ℗ Analogue Film in a digital Age?

[macfred]

Terms and Rules of this forum:
-) no digital vs. traditional threads

There's a big difference in actual -/ desired conditions - I have enabled 'analog only' but there is always a thread (or more) on page one, where the participants are fighting the old battle.

 

[faberryman]

At some point, today's digital technology will be like the Saturn V rockets. Most of the engineers who knew how to make them are dead, most of the people who knew how to run them are dead, and all we have are blueprints and instruction manuals and a few scattered people with fading memories. Efforts to recover digital photo files would involve reverse engineering and significant archival efforts... which, predictably, would be to convert the files to "modern", "contemporary" formats, thus merely kicking the can down the road. We seem to think digital files are more permanent than analog formats, but in reality they are some of the least permanent forms of information we have yet created, and their strength really just lies in their great short-term convenience.

At some point in the future, printing black and white and color film will have to be re-engineered as well. The solution is to print your important images, whether you shoot analog or digital. The negative/file is just an intermediate step.

 

[removed account4]

If, today, a historical digital photo were made similar to Earthrise (or perhaps of a famous person), where would that image reside? The image is on the sensor for only a moment and then off it goes to the SD card. From there, it can be copied, perfectly, ad infinitum. So there is no single instance, no unique form of that image that is directly tied to being on the very spot from which the image was made.

So it is the same with prints. A print of Earthrise would be nice, but it doesn't have the provenance of the actual negative that was in that Hasselblad.

Someone could create fake - a copy of the negative or a copy of a glass plate image made during the U.S. Civil War and it may be hard to detect that fake. However, that does not detract from the provenance of the real image - for there is only one real image.

thanks for the explanation.
makes me wonder if they will ever have removable sensors / electronic film so if someone NEEDS some sort of historical artifact
like you are talking about, it will remain on the sensor and not be trampoline'd onto the memory card. single use sensors ...

 

[keenmaster486]

single use sensors ...

At that point, it occurs to me that it might be easier to just use film...

 

[removed account4]

At that point, it occurs to me that it might be easier to just use film...

why is that?...
lets say .. it is 2021 and there are no labs left locally
and it is cost prohibitive to have chromes or color images printed
and you NEEDED a record color image of some sort of event that was personally/socially &c
important ... the sensor will be like a burn one time cd sort of thing .. its permenantly on the sensor
can't be altered and can be plugged into whatever reader can be used to transfer the impression / data into an image
much like a latent image is stored on the film until it is put through chemicals to become a negative.
and at that point, there will really be no difference between an image made with a digital camera
and one made with film ( or paper or whatever ) because as theo s. said there will be a truly
unique object physical+tangible connection between the subject and the image

 

[jtk]

At that point, it occurs to me that it might be easier to just use film...

If you're into to easy answers and are less interested in photographic images I guess you're right.

 

[blockend]

Instead of an enlarger, a piece of silver based light sensitive paper is exposed in a machine that contains digital files. All the convenience of digital photography, with the substance of a silver print.