Digital technology ruined photography for me, or did people ruin it? (or both)

[Buckster]

Good ol' Buckster. Always ready with his industrial grade 500hp hair splitter!

Where's that positive attitude you were goin' on about? Turn that furious face upside down!

I'm not furious at all. I wasn't even furious when it happened. I was disappointed, sure, but I got over it and moved on to bigger and better things. Besides, I still had the most important of them in prints in the photo albums, which she kept. (which I scanned later to digital, btw. )

I'm just relaying some of my experiences that don't seem to jive with what you're saying. And I've talked with a LOT of other photographers who've had very similar experiences with their boxes of negs and transparencies.

 

[PixelRabbit]

So basically it comes down to one simple thing, the longer you leave your files/negatives without maintaining them the more costly it will be to "restore" them and you very well may pay the ultimate price of an unrecoverable image.

 

[Didereaux]

I don't know the names of the formats but NASA has either lost imagery or come very very close to it in the past. This was of course due to a failure of diligence in copying things forward. But that's the point, absent diligence, digital is terrible whereas film can be pretty good.

Tell that to the boxes of negs and transparencies I used to have that succumbed to water damage, humidity, mold, mildew, and an ex-wife who simply threw tons of them away while getting ready for a major move from Detroit to Boston, where I already had secured a job.

No, I'd say that absent diligence, film is no better off.

On that point I agree. But the boxes require only the owners low tech diligence to preserve. On the other hand tech data requires a hugely expensive and complex operation to preserve its data.

No sir, it doesn't.

Simple denial, sir, is not proof of anything!

 

[Buckster]

I suspect a a hard drive and negatives caught up in a firestorm or in a flood would fair no better.

Here's the BIG difference: The box of analog is the ONLY copy of those negs and transparencies. The hard drive is likely just one of possibly MANY copies, all exactly the same, of those DIGITAL equivalents of negs and transparencies.

One is easily recoverable by simply pulling up one of the copies. The other has no copies to pull up.

 

[Gary A.]

A few years ago I discovered a box full of prints in the garage that was laying around for decades.

You "discovered" them, meaning you didn't even know they were there. They could have been in a landfill, for all you knew. How many that you haven't "discovered" might very well BE in a landfill or otherwise lost forever?

I doubt I would have retrieved anything if it was a hard drive.

Why?

Nine years ago, my daughter went to Italy with her Senior class. She took a TON of digital photos and stored them on a portable drive I gave her for the trip. When she got home she moved them from the portable drive to her computer, and gave me the portable drive, cleaned.

She never backed them up from there. (Insert ominous sound here).

A couple years went by, and then her hard drive crashed. HARD. Nothing retrievable. Her Italy photos were gone. FOREVER. She learned a lesson about backing up her files, but it was a lesson learned too late for her prized Italy photos.

More years passed, and occasionally, she would lament the loss of her Italy pictures.

One day, I ran across that old portable hard drive she used for the trip; The one she cleaned before returning it to me. I seldom ever used it myself, especially after Italy. I just didn't have a reason to. So, mostly on a whim, I ran a file recovery software on it, just to see if there were any Italy pics still recoverable on it.

It found every one of them. Thousands of them. And the videos also. All intact. I recovered them all. I backed them up on two hard drives, and a couple of DVDs. The next time I saw my daughter, I handed her one of the DVDs with a grin (not labelled), and told her to take a look. She plugged it in, and had one of the best days of her life.

True story.

??????

If they were in a landfill I most likely would not have discovered them wouldn't I ... and there isn't much I can do about those that I haven't discovered. The same goes for digital media. If an old hard drive filled with old images makes it way to a landfill ... not much I can do about it.

If she had shot film ... the negatives would have been her back up ... end of story.

 

[Gary A.]

I suspect a a hard drive and negatives caught up in a firestorm or in a flood would fair no better.

Here's the BIG difference: The box of analog is the ONLY copy of those negs and transparencies. The hard drive is likely just one of possibly MANY copies, all exactly the same, of those DIGITAL equivalents of negs and transparencies.

One is easily recoverable by simply pulling up one of the copies. The other has no copies to pull up.

Maybe ... maybe not. That is all speculation. I have multiple prints of the same thing, it isn't hard to copy slides or negatives. (Think about movies.)

 

[Buckster]

I don't know the names of the formats but NASA has either lost imagery or come very very close to it in the past. This was of course due to a failure of diligence in copying things forward. But that's the point, absent diligence, digital is terrible whereas film can be pretty good.

Tell that to the boxes of negs and transparencies I used to have that succumbed to water damage, humidity, mold, mildew, and an ex-wife who simply threw tons of them away while getting ready for a major move from Detroit to Boston, where I already had secured a job.

No, I'd say that absent diligence, film is no better off.

On that point I agree. But the boxes require only the owners low tech diligence to preserve. On the other hand tech data requires a hugely expensive and complex operation to preserve its data.

No sir, it doesn't.

Simple denial, sir, is not proof of anything!

What more do you need? It's just simply NOT a "hugely expensive and complex operation" the way you claim it is.

 

[robbins.photo]

First I have a question for you. Have you ever tried to open a Linux partition in Windows?

Once. I wound up in the hospital. On the upside it was the first trip I took to the ER that wasn't proceeded by my once famous catch phrase, "Hey guys, watch this!"

How about an early Apple? To recover that data requires someone to not only have all the old OS's, converters etc, but in many cases they also must have the hardware with the proper chips in order to do anything. That is hugely expensive. Some companies do that, but let me ask you this, Do you believe companies do not go out of business?

Those are trivial examples, but you have descended into the trivial with your ignoring the fundamentals behind technological data usage. Go study up, or simply continue as you have been, but try and ease up on disseminating half-baked info about technology.

Non proprietary formats like JPG and TIFF will work fine on multiple platforms of course, but normally when your backing up a lot of files a lot of times you are using some form of backup program that also provides it's own compression, allows you to do sequential backups, etc. This is where a lot of problems can arise, but as someone else mentioned previously all that's really required is a little due diligence.

Personally having shot some 35 mm back in the day, I much prefer a digitized format myself. Thanks to a fire, a flood and at least one tornado I really don't have anything left from those days that is still in it's original film / negative format. Fortunately for me I did purchase a scanner eons and eons ago that allowed me to scan all my negatives into a digital format - and as a result despite mother natures best efforts I still have most of the shots that I considered to be really important. A few losses here and there over the years but for the most part the stuff I really wanted to keep the most, I still have - and I don't have boxes and boxes of stuff to store, it all fits on one portable device which can be really nice. Trick is just to have an extra copy or two.

 

[sashbar]

Digital is killing photography for those who are unable to raise above the average but want to feel special and belong to some "elite club". There were times when you could produce a couple of mediocre shots and still feel unique. Now every Tom and Dick and Harry can do it. So the choice these days is simple - either you raise above mediocrity and do some really good stuff or just try to live with the fact that you are just one of those Tom-Dick-and-Harrys.

To say that digital killed photography is akin of saying that the law which allowed to write in other languages but Latin killed poetry.

 

[Ysarex]

Gary how is not looking after your bits and different from not looking after your negs?

A house fire will kill your negs, just like a lightning strike will kill your harddisk. If anything it is easier to now ensure your photos will last longer than ever before. Just use open standard formats, and use redundancy + backup + checksumming to store them, and diversify their locations to protect them from weather and environment.

Oh yeah? Tried to get data off a 8" floppy lately? How about the wee fact that data is continually changing the format that is is written in, and on. Do those backups also store the OS's, and Apps used to create the data?

Oh wait you said keep it backed up on the latest, so in effect to preserve your data it will cost you a small fortune, be a constant effort to convert it to the latest formats, and rely solely on the 'warehouse' to remain accessible. That is the fallacy of the digital age...the belief that data is immortal.

True enough that paper burns, but have you considered the odds of your house burning down vs computer failure? I respect your knowledge of photography, but in all honesty your grasp of technology sucks!

Numbers (digital) can be copied with zero loss. Analog data can not. This is the one crucial difference.

Assuming you're like 99 plus % of film photographers, you have color film and prints. Your color film is fading. You can't stop it from fading. You can freeze dry it (can't imagine that will cost too much to do and maintain right) and that still won't ultimately stop it from deteriorating. Your color prints are fading. You can't stop them from fading. You can freeze dry those and enjoy them in your walk-in freezer gallery -- well not really because if you open the door you'll let in moisture. If you have a color film original and print from that film then that image has a fixed and short life and it's demise is guaranteed. The only way you can potentially extend it's life would be to digitize it.

If I had data previously stored on an 8 inch floppy I would have transferred it by now to other media with no loss to the data. Something impossible to do with film. Yes, that's a maintenance job but at least it's possible and at a fraction of the cost involved in just trying to extend the life of a color film image. Your color film and prints come with an expiration date and they start to fade the minute they're created.

Joe

Completely ignoring the cogent part, "How about the wee fact that data is continually changing the format that is is written in, and on. Do those backups also store the OS's, and Apps used to create the data? " Try again.

Nonsense. OS and Apps aren't needed if the data is in a readable format.

Joe

 

[Buckster]

I suspect a a hard drive and negatives caught up in a firestorm or in a flood would fair no better.

Here's the BIG difference: The box of analog is the ONLY copy of those negs and transparencies. The hard drive is likely just one of possibly MANY copies, all exactly the same, of those DIGITAL equivalents of negs and transparencies.

One is easily recoverable by simply pulling up one of the copies. The other has no copies to pull up.

Maybe ... maybe not. That is all speculation. I have multiple prints of the same thing, it isn't hard to copy slides or negatives. (Think about movies.)

So, you're saying that having multiple prints from your slides and negs is the same as having the original slides and negs if they were lost or destroyed? If that's true, then why hang onto the slides and negs at all?

 

[robbins.photo]

Digital is killing photography for those who are unable to raise above the average but want to belong to some "elite club".

Wait, there's a club? Cool. So, is there like a secret handshake too?

 

[Ysarex]

Completely ignoring the cogent part, "How about the wee fact that data is continually changing the format that is is written in, and on. Do those backups also store the OS's, and Apps used to create the data? " Try again.

Explain how exactly that matters?

Why does it matter what kind of media a TIF or JPG is written on, as long as it can be copied to other media when the time comes?

Why does the backup have to store the program the TIF or JPG was created with, as long as other programs can read the files?

Why does the backup have to store the OS, as long as other OS's can read the data?

This ain't the wild west of the very early days of computer systems, where we might need to get our hands on an Altair to read the files that were written by one. Do you really think that suddenly overnight, no browsers will be able to read JPGs anymore? Do you really think that suddenly overnight, no programs will be able to read RAW files anymore? Or TIFs, or PNGs, or any other common image format?

Be serious for a moment and explain why we should panic about how we might all lose our digital images per your warnings. Spell out a realistic scenario.

Ok, last time. First I have a question for you. Have you ever tried to open a Linux partition in Windows? How about an early Apple? To recover that data requires someone to not only have all the old OS's, converters etc, but in many cases they also must have the hardware with the proper chips in order to do anything.

You don't recover the data you maintain it -- huge difference. Takes a little time and effort and very little cost.

That is hugely expensive. Some companies do that, but let me ask you this, Do you believe companies do not go out of business?

Those are trivial examples, but you have descended into the trivial with your ignoring the fundamentals behind technological data usage. Go study up, or simply continue as you have been, but try and ease up on disseminating half-baked info about technology.

I used early Apples. I used early CPM machine. I work seamlessly now between Apple, Linux and Window. I run Linux and Windows on this same machine and all data is accessible to both systems. I have never had a problem transferring data.

Joe

 

[sashbar]

Digital is killing photography for those who are unable to raise above the average but want to belong to some "elite club".

Wait, there's a club? Cool. So, is there like a secret handshake too?

The WAS a club. It was called Darkroom Alchemy. Now it is closed for good.

 

[Didereaux]

Well at this juncture it is a 'Mexican Stand-off'. so I'm outa here, and will let future readers read the conjecture and my facts lol...and draw their own conclusions. The whole thing is academic anyhow since not a single soul on here has the slightest clue what lies in the future for either tech or the universe.

 

[robbins.photo]

Digital is killing photography for those who are unable to raise above the average but want to belong to some "elite club".

Wait, there's a club? Cool. So, is there like a secret handshake too?

The WAS a club. It was called Darkroom Alchemy. Now it is closed for good.

Drat. Day late and a dollar short, as usual. Say, since they closed - did they have like a stuffed deer head and some of those really big leather chairs? Might those be for sale then?