Coming Back Full Circle to Film and Paper
by Derrick Story
Much of the hallway talk around PMA has drifted to archiving, the permanence of prints from today's home printers, and what shape our images will be in 100 years from now. The growing distrust of optical media's archival ability combined with its lack of storage capacity for today's huge files has people wondering, "what should I use?"
Hard drives seem OK for temporary storage, as long as there's plenty of redundancy. But are they really practical over decades? Suddenly photographers are thinking about archiving to paper and film again -- printing on stable stock with long lasting dyes and migrating their most cherished digital images to back to film. When stored properly, this return to paper and celluloid makes a certain amount of sense... I think. Or does it?
7 Comments
consumer_q 2006-02-28 08:43:55 |
The benefits of digital storage outweight the benefits of prints, imo. Digital allows for everybody to have "masters" without degradation, there is substatially less waste, and people have a choice to display and distribute photographs in a way most convenient to the individual (print, digital frame, website, email, & etc.).
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Roshambo 2006-02-28 11:36:44 |
I completely agree with you--digital storage is far better for so many reasons--but think of the Betamax. The real problem with digital storage is obsoleteness. Having to move your media around to new storage formats and old ones begin to disappear is definitely something to fear, not me mention incredibly inconvenient. |
Mike A 2006-02-28 16:25:00 |
Whilst Hard Disks can fail, storing on paper still has similar issues. Fire is a problem for both solutions, but at least storing digitally is easy to do in 2 seperate locations almost as soon as the photo is taken.
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Skip 2006-02-28 16:33:31 |
I shoot film with an old Leica, scan it to redundant external HD's, and will upgrade as the technology dictates. Will you be able to print one of my shots a hundred years from now, nope. Will you be able to find one of my negs a hundred years from now, nope. I lose them all the time, but have never lost a single digital file. Several photographers lost their life's negative collections during Katrina. To be of any value to a living photographer, negs need to be at hand and most don't have disaster proof storage. Fire proof file cabinets maybe, nothing for flooding and wind, that would require a Force 5, Reichter 8, saferoom at high elevation. Sounds like self important FUD. |
Jeff 2006-03-01 06:35:20 |
I've actually been wondering if there is a way to save digital images out to film. I've taken my parents negatives going back to the 1960's and I'm in the process of scanning those in. I'm also storing the negatives in notebooks now. And it got me to wonder about all my digital images and how will I store them. DVD's are not the answer from everything I've been hearing about their life expectancy. And can everyone afford a RAID environment? |
FARfetched 2006-03-01 07:13:22 |
This isn't necessarily a concern only for professionals. Future generations will want your media, be it text, still photo, or video, for family history if nothing else.
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consumer_q 2006-03-01 12:18:51 |
I am willing to bet that in 50 years it is going to be a lot easier and much more cost effective to transfer from digital-to-digital, than trancode from analogue-to-digital. For example, going from analogue 16mm film to digital miniDV/betacam is rather expensive because of setup time, film cleaning, realtime monitoring and transcoding. However, if you keep your digital archives reasonably *organized* dropping bits (whether audio, video, or photgraph) across to new media should be a snap.
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