boojum
Ignoble Miscreant
Rutger Hauer's soliloquy as he is dying in Blade Runner sums it all too well, our lives are but tears in rain. Omar said,
"Some for the Glories of This World; and some
Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come;
Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go,
Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!"
"Some for the Glories of This World; and some
Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come;
Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go,
Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!"
Bill Clark
Veteran
I make photographs of my family for my family.
Archiver
Veteran
As my personal photographic journey has mostly been digital, I haven't had to worry about what 100,000 negatives/slides would look like. How much space did this magnificent collection take up?
Almost every digital image I've shot resides on a series of hard drives, and after 20+ years, I could probably consolidate all of these files into 25-30 terabytes. This includes raws, exported jpegs, and video clips. As for negatives, all of them fit into a shoebox, along with the scans on CD.
There have been a few losses along the way, including a CD of images I took at the filming of a TV commercial for milk that happened in our street in the 2000s. And I still hold hope for a hard drive that contains all images from 2018, 2019 and 2020 that went on the fritz. Stupid me didn't think of backing up in all that time. Argh.
A
AndyCapp
Guest
All my CDs had holes in them, and I could not boot the old iMac hard disk.
Now I back up on iCloud and the amazing Thunderbolt SSDs.
Coldkennels
Barnack-toting Brit.
This. I've had far too many hard drives and CD-Rs/DVD-Rs fail and become unreadable to ever trust them completely. Although I should note that SSDs fail without warning, while HDDs usually give you some clues before they die for good. I keep SSDs for working on but still use HDDs for backups for this reason.
Redundancy is key to backups: duplicate everything to multiple hard drives, store a copy off-site, etc. - but remember that "the cloud" is really just "another person's computer". It's only as reliable as their backup protocol is, and you have to be sure you trust them with your data - and that you know they'll be around for the long-term. I'd never entrust anything important to Google, for instance (for a company whose slogan used to be "don't be evil", they sure love selling any and all information they can get from you), nor would I go all-in on some small-time company that may disappear in two years.
But the ultimate issue is that digital is all-or-nothing. An analogue signal can degrade and still be readable to some degree; we can pull an image from all but the most heavily damaged negatives, even if it isn't perfect. But once a digital file is even slightly damaged, whatever it contained might as well be considered lost.
DownUnder
Nikon Nomad
At the ripe old age of 13 I was photographing news events for two provincial (in Canada) papers. Also weddings, 50th wedding anniversaries, christenings, parties. I quickly dropped the weddings as they were far too much effort for too little return, but the rest of my "imagery" work led me to a 20-year career as a newspaper journalist, a PR writer for national television, a roving reporter, and eventually a media marketer, one of the early ones in Sydney (Australia) before that career area took off like a gunshot and everybody got into it.
After my move to Australia in the mid-'70s photography became secondary to my writing and other related work. I gave myself long holiday breaks between media contracts, usually to Southeast Asia where I photographed like mad, travel, landscapes, general images for stock sales. The going was good for 'stock' in those days. I did two trips to Bali (1972 and 1974) and shot mostly Kodachrome but also a lot of B&W. Back then photographs of Bali could easily be sold and my B&W sales actually outpaced the color work for a few years. A German magazine did a two-page spread of a sunrise shot I had taken on Tri-X, with a color tint, and then insisted on paying me the (lower) B&W fee for it. I complained and wrote letters and eventually got paid the color fee which was 50% higher. Those were the good old days.
The going was good while it lasted but like almost everything in one's life, it had to end. Which it did for me, in the mid-1980s. I changed directions twice, the first time to the Australian civil service and then to a new career as an interior design architect.
By the '90s I was still doing stock but more so for my own leisure and pleasure. My 'styles' changed drastically and I gradually evolved a more personal approach. Fewer Velveeta landscapes and travel-magazine oriented scenes to more direct imagery, people, places, close-ups. Much more satisfying, and to my surprise these new images went on selling. I also did architectural photography, notably of old colonial buildings in Asian countries.
My stock work kept me busy til the mid-'00s when digital photography became more,"commonplace" (popular) and amateur shooters began flooding the market with what I derided as "digicrap" but a lot of it was (and still is) superlatively good, they were selling it as cheap as chips or even giving it away, and as the years passed my sales went down. 2016 was my last good year for stock. I still make a few sales but now in my 70s my interests are elsewhere and I no longer submit as much to agencies as I did twenty years ago, that and younger photographers have stepped in to fill my shoes and are keeping the (very few) sales markets still buying at sensible prices, well supplied with quality images. My time as a photographer has mostly passed. In some ways I miss it, in other ways I don't.
My most satisfying photography has been of my family in Canada and my life in Australia. In the former, I was the only family member with pro quality gear (a Yashica D TLR and a Metz electronic flash) and I did a lot of weekend photography of my grandparents, who were cow and pig farmers and producers of maple syrup in eastern Canada. The color slides I took of my grandma in her flower garden or tending the hooks (chickens), and of my grandpa and my cousins making maple candy are the only images we have of them at that time (early to mid-'60s). Sadly, all of them are gone now. I'm one of very few survivors of my generation of cousins, nephews and nieces. Which of course makes those old images of mine all the more precious to my younger relations.
Nowadays I do mostly postcard travel images when I'm out and about in Asia, and of our cats at home or on bush landscapes during our walks in rural Australia. Not as exciting as when I was younger, but it still satisfies, and it keeps me out and about.
To be honest, I still haven't fully worked out why I take pictures. I doubt I ever will. But I hope to have a good longer time to do all my pondering.
After my move to Australia in the mid-'70s photography became secondary to my writing and other related work. I gave myself long holiday breaks between media contracts, usually to Southeast Asia where I photographed like mad, travel, landscapes, general images for stock sales. The going was good for 'stock' in those days. I did two trips to Bali (1972 and 1974) and shot mostly Kodachrome but also a lot of B&W. Back then photographs of Bali could easily be sold and my B&W sales actually outpaced the color work for a few years. A German magazine did a two-page spread of a sunrise shot I had taken on Tri-X, with a color tint, and then insisted on paying me the (lower) B&W fee for it. I complained and wrote letters and eventually got paid the color fee which was 50% higher. Those were the good old days.
The going was good while it lasted but like almost everything in one's life, it had to end. Which it did for me, in the mid-1980s. I changed directions twice, the first time to the Australian civil service and then to a new career as an interior design architect.
By the '90s I was still doing stock but more so for my own leisure and pleasure. My 'styles' changed drastically and I gradually evolved a more personal approach. Fewer Velveeta landscapes and travel-magazine oriented scenes to more direct imagery, people, places, close-ups. Much more satisfying, and to my surprise these new images went on selling. I also did architectural photography, notably of old colonial buildings in Asian countries.
My stock work kept me busy til the mid-'00s when digital photography became more,"commonplace" (popular) and amateur shooters began flooding the market with what I derided as "digicrap" but a lot of it was (and still is) superlatively good, they were selling it as cheap as chips or even giving it away, and as the years passed my sales went down. 2016 was my last good year for stock. I still make a few sales but now in my 70s my interests are elsewhere and I no longer submit as much to agencies as I did twenty years ago, that and younger photographers have stepped in to fill my shoes and are keeping the (very few) sales markets still buying at sensible prices, well supplied with quality images. My time as a photographer has mostly passed. In some ways I miss it, in other ways I don't.
My most satisfying photography has been of my family in Canada and my life in Australia. In the former, I was the only family member with pro quality gear (a Yashica D TLR and a Metz electronic flash) and I did a lot of weekend photography of my grandparents, who were cow and pig farmers and producers of maple syrup in eastern Canada. The color slides I took of my grandma in her flower garden or tending the hooks (chickens), and of my grandpa and my cousins making maple candy are the only images we have of them at that time (early to mid-'60s). Sadly, all of them are gone now. I'm one of very few survivors of my generation of cousins, nephews and nieces. Which of course makes those old images of mine all the more precious to my younger relations.
Nowadays I do mostly postcard travel images when I'm out and about in Asia, and of our cats at home or on bush landscapes during our walks in rural Australia. Not as exciting as when I was younger, but it still satisfies, and it keeps me out and about.
To be honest, I still haven't fully worked out why I take pictures. I doubt I ever will. But I hope to have a good longer time to do all my pondering.
DownUnder
Nikon Nomad
Good advice here. I copy everything I have on hard disks to new disks every couple of years.
So far I've lost only one disk. In 2014 one of our cats knocked a small portable HD I had stupidly left on a table in our dining room, to the floor. Wrecked the thing and everything I had on it, kaput Fortunately, I had just two weeks before done the two-year backup of it all, so nothing was really lost.
Kudos to you, Coldkennels, for posting this. A timely reminder to all of us to pull up our socks and make those duplicate disks.
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yanchep_mike
Always Trying
Just getting back to the original threat.
I make photographs as a hobby, i like the process and sometimes the result, but that does not stop me
from trying.
I make photographs as a hobby, i like the process and sometimes the result, but that does not stop me
from trying.
DownUnder
Nikon Nomad
Good one. During the Covid lockdown in Australia I spent almost 12 months scanning and processing all the important negatives and slides in my past, before I decided whether or not to keep them or send them off to the scissors and the kitchen rubbish bin.
As a result I have several digit tons of scanned images I may never ever look at again. But them's the breaks.
All that work did wonders to help me pass the time when we were (more or less) locked up at home. But I'm not sure what all that work did for my sanity...
A
AndyCapp
Guest
Your sanity is just fine—my honest opinion.
boojum
Ignoble Miscreant
Sanity? Sanity??!! Just another bourgeois preoccupation and vastly overrated. ;o)
Jonathan R
Well-known
I thought all CDs had holes in them?
A
AndyCapp
Guest
CDs normally only have one hole in the center.
You have weird thoughts.
Jonathan R
Well-known
boojum
Ignoble Miscreant
There was a story "back in the day" that Philips engineers got the CD size from a beer coaster and the center hole size from the smallest Dutch coin. Whether this is true or not it is a great story.
A
AndyCapp
Guest
The first CD I bought was The Traveling Wilburys.
CMur12
Veteran
DownUnder
Nikon Nomad
Many thanks. I will happily quote you on this at home. I need all the help I can get...
As for backing up on CDs, the same camera expert who advised me to back up everything to a new hard disk every couple of years, told me to never ever use CDs for anything other than copying music, and even that when I still had the originals, like my jazz LPs which are now in safe storage and number in the duo thousands.
Archiver, my 'stash' of negatives and slides took up all the space in a four-door wardrobe in our spare bedroom/my darkroom/my safe spot hider-hole when things domestic get to be too much for me. I culled and culled during Covid and am now down to only three doors of the same four doors. The additional freed space now holds my fast-dwindling supply of good red wines, much of which now seems to be evaporating as if secretly consumed by the household devils. I keep meaning to look into this in greater depth, but being me I find it easier to order a mixed dozen from a reputable winery every now and then, to fill up the gaps.
Mind you, I still have a box or even two boxes of old negatives in our (temperature stable) garage, so I had best be ultra careful of what I boast about...
