A heart-warming story about....FILM

[julianphotoart]

I have such a heartwarming story to tell. Some weeks ago I wrote a thread about what appeared to be the inevitability of buying a digital SLR for my wife. After having used a digital P&S for a year or so, her comments to me about its shortcomings all seemed to point to a digital SLR.

About 10 days ago the digital P&S died. Matters had come to a head. My wife said to me, "I need you to sit down and tell me all the pros and cons of digital versus film." I did so. I compared all aspects of dealing with a 10mp digital SLR with a moderately-specified film SLR. We talked about SLR's because she needs auto-focus and instant shutter response.

My wife’s requirements (not those suggested by me) were: (1) instant response when she presses the shutter (she was sick and tired of shutter lag with the digital P&S); (2) the ease of getting quality prints made for her (she was less concerned with how quickly she got them); (3) price; (4) size (this meant that she also did not want a zoom; she wanted a simple "normal" lens); (5) weight; (6) auto-focus she could rely on (her vision is not the best); (7) an “auto” mode that would render the camera as simple as a P&S until she learns how to use the various features (she would like to learn, but has precious little time); (8) simple storage of images.

In response to her concerns, I told her:

1. Both film SLR and digital SLR will give her pretty-much instant response when she presses the shutter. Either way it would be a dramatic improvement over the digital P&S.
2. Film prints means, for example, taking it to our local Costco for one-hour developing and asking for a CD to go with it. Digital prints means taking the memory card to that same Costco, putting the card in one of those machines, and ordering just the prints she wants in any number she wants.
3. A film SLR with a 50mm lens will be about $200. Digital SLR with the equivalent of a 50mm lens (i.e. 35mm if it's an APS-C sensor) will be somewhere between $800 - $1,000. I mentioned how these cameras can come in kits with cheap zooms, or body-only for almost the same money as the kit.
4. Both film and digital SLR’s vary in size but in neither case would it be anywhere near as small as her digital P&S. The film SLR would be slightly more slender, but the other dimensions roughly the same.
5. Both film and digital SLR’s vary in weight. My limited experience was that a moderately priced film SLR would tend to be lighter than a moderately priced digital SLR. “Moderately-priced” meaning about $200 for film versus about $800 for digital.
6. Auto-focus for film versus digital would be the same.
7. “Auto-everything” picture-taking mode would be the same.
8. Storage of images would be very different, as she well knew. Basically negatives versus a variety of digital storage possibilities which I described (her past experience with managing images on the computer did not make her excited about more of the same).

After discussing all of the above, she decided on FILM. Woo-hoo.

We then looked on eBay and found a brand-new Nikon N75 at Wolf Camera in Dallas for all of $99. It has a metal lens mount, built-in flash, an auto-everything mode, and it’s light as a feather. It arrived in 2 days. We got a brand-new Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 lens for about $110 to go with it. The N75 even helps her out by deciding when the flash should pop up.

She loves it. She’s taken more photos in the past week than she did in the past 3 months with her digital P&S. She’s so happy that when she presses the button the camera will take the picture at that moment. She is more than happy to go to Costco for prints and a CD and she's reassured to once again be dealing with real-life negatives as opposed to computer files and folders.

What a happy story.

 

[Al Patterson]

An excellent summation of digital v. film. I'm still dragging my feet re: DSLRs myself, as $1,000 buys a lot of film processing. (And, my digital P&S still works, so no need to junp quickly.)

 

[jan normandale]

Julian add one more user to the universe!

 

[airds]

No mention of running costs I see :-(

 

[julianphotoart]

No mention of running costs I see :-(

I take it you mean on-going costs. She didn't want to hear about that either way. She was obviously happy to pay much less up-front for the film camera. After that, the comparative cost of film and developing versus computer, software, printer ink, etc. were not part of her equation. Ease and simplicity is her equation, along with the long-term security of the image in physical form (i.e., a negative).

 

[Tuolumne]

I always have to wonder out loud when people talk about the better physical security of negatives over digital storage. I don't get it. I have been taking photos all my life, including the last 18 years of negative-only photos of my family. Where are those negatives now? Beats me! They're down in the basement somehere in boxes...I think. If I needed them or wanted to get at them could I? Probably if my life depended on it, but not otherwise. They are lost to time, just like the many photos and negatives that my father took of our family when I was growing up. I suspect that unless you are a professional photographer with a highly organized filing system this is true of you, too.

Now, where are my digital negatives from the past 7 years? why they are all right here in front of me on my computer at my finger tips. Incluidng tripply backed up: once on a second drive on my computer, once on a portable, removable, external drive in my brief case, and once on Flickr. I think they may even be safe from nuclear war fare.

Will I be able to access them 50 years from now, the way you can with your negatives, if you are lucky enough to find any of them 50 years from now? Of course they will, because I won't wait 50 years to try to retrieve them. With each next generatiion computer purchase I will move them to the new technology, so it will be a slow evolutionary process, not a radical jump.

I use and love both film and digital. But don't tell me how wonderful negatives are for secure storage when I have a hard time finding the ones I shot three months ago. Thanks Heavens for that CD I got so I could at least put them online! 🙂

T.

 

[jlw]

I always have to wonder out loud when people talk about the better physical security of negatives over digital storage. I don't get it. I have been taking photos all my life, including the last 18 years of negative-only photos of my family. Where are those negatives now? Beats me! They're down in the basement somehere in boxes...I think. If I needed them or wanted to get at them could I? Probably if my life depended on it, but not otherwise. They are lost to time, just like the many photos and negatives that my father took of our family when I was growing up. I suspect that unless you are a professional photographer with a highly organized filing system this is true of you, too.

Obviously you're good at organizing things on a computer, so why not let your computer organize your negative collection as well?

For more than 25 years I've kept track of negatives by numbering them with a simple sequential system: the first roll of film I shoot in March 2007 will be roll number 07-03-01 (and the twenty-fifth frame on that roll will be 07-03-01_25, and so forth.) As soon as a new roll is dry (or back from the lab) I write the roll number with a fine-tip marker on the leader ahead of frame 1, and on the sleeve in which I keep the negative. The negative goes into a metal cabinet along with all my other negs, simply lined up in drawers in numerical order.

Then I enter the number in a FileMaker database I made up myself, adding a little basic information about the subjects on that roll. The whole process takes about one minute, and is easy to do while the negatives are fresh in my mind.

Later... possibly much later... the database makes it easy to retrieve the negatives I need. For example, last weekend I saw a production of the ballet Coppélia, which brought back fond recollections of seeing my friend Susannah Israel in the same ballet back in the 1980s. I don't remember any of the details... but all I have to do is fire up the database and type 'Susannah Israel Coppelia' into the Find field, and in two seconds I know my photos of that production are on roll 87-04-11. Now all I need to do is open my 1987 file drawer and the negatives will be right there.

You're probably saying, "Yeah, that's fine if you've been sticking with it since the 1980s, but I'll never catch up with all the negatives I've just been throwing into the basement." Well, I say "bull"-- or, more appropriately, I say "elephant." Haven't you ever heard that joke about how do you eat an elephant? The answer: One bite at a time. Index your negatives the same way: build your database, using whatever categories of information work for you, then pull out a handful of, say, ten rolls' worth of negatives, number them, and type in the info. It'll only take about five minutes. Tomorrow do ten more rolls. The next day do ten more rolls. If you've got a thousand rolls of film, you'll be done before summer starts. What's the sweat?

Is it really worth the bother? I've told this story before, but I'll do it again: A couple of years ago Sherri, a friend of mine, died tragically young of liver cancer. She had been a dancer (never a star, but serious and professional) back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I was just starting to photograph dance, and one of her friends asked if I could possibly find any pictures of her from that era to display at her funeral. I hadn't thought about a lot of these pictures for years - but when I fired up the database, there were the numbers, and the negatives were right there in the drawer waiting. I spent a somewhat tearful but satisfying evening scanning them and making prints for a little display to honor that part of her life. It meant a lot to her parents.

Of that group, one of the pictures that "got" to everyone the most was the one I'm attaching, showing Sherri and her friend Leslie sleeping on the tour bus on the way to a Nutcracker performance in Geneva, Nebraska. When I had snapped it, some twenty years before, it was just a funny little picture that I didn't think twice about. Now, to a lot of people, it seemed to say something comforting about someone who had had a hard struggle with life, and now, finally, was peacefully at rest.

So you see, you never know what your pictures may mean to someone years from now. So straighten out those negatives, y'hear???

 

[sepiareverb]

... But don't tell me how wonderful negatives are for secure storage when I have a hard time finding the ones I shot three months ago. Thanks Heavens for that CD I got so I could at least put them online! 🙂

T.

SOunds like you need some kind of simple storage system for negs.

I needed to find a neg the other day for my wife- to do a scan. Took me less than 5 minutes. This was shot 4 years ago- I dissappeared into the studio hallway, and popped back out with the neg page in hand. Scan was uploaded in less than 15 minutes from the time she asked "if I could???..." Depends on how you're organized.

I do think that film has some advantages over digital- for me the main thing is the object in hand. I like something in my hand. I like knowing that it will never get lost or damaged unless I do something dumb (yes, I've been dumb).

But, to each his own

 

[photogdave]

That's the other side of the coin. With film most people tend to keep every neg or slide, whether it was printed/viewed or not. I find when I go through my old stuff with a fresh perspective I see some images in a new light and wonder why I didn't print it in the first place.
With digital there is a tendency to trash the images not going to be used to save "valuable" space in the backup system. Of course many people will backup their entire photo shoot so I'm not trying to say one way is better than the other.
For the record I prefer to look at "hard copy" negs and slides on a light table rather than thumbnails on a screen.

 

[fuwen]

I do not index my negatives in a very detailed manner. Just date and some descriptions, and corresponding hard copy prints in photo album. Based on a print in my album, I normally can recover the negative (for the past about 20 years) within 30 mins.

The more serious problem I am facing is the negatives are fading, rather than finding them. Digital will not fade actually is an advantage, but with technology still not stabilising, the issue is your present copy is very likely not the best in terms of resolution and megapix etc etc.

 

[julianphotoart]

I certainly understand about the difficulty with storing negatives in an organized fashion. My wife's the organized one so, to her, keeping all the negatives of our daughter that she's now going to have presents no problem.

 

[jan normandale]

@ Tuolumne... storage of any kind isn't the issue it's a byproduct of the photographic act. She has chosen a medium that is versatile and has a long history which surpasses digital. Good choice in my opinion. From time to time I shoot digital but when I "get serious" about shooting I reach for film. Its a cost effective solution and especially in MF. Cost per image blown to 16x20 and larger is still very affordable compared to the same option in digital.

And if I want I can also store scanned digital copies on my desktop, back up hard drive and burned CD's... or not.

In conclusion.. glad to hear she chose film.. it's a good choice.

 

[FrankS]

I always have to wonder out loud when people talk about the better physical security of negatives over digital storage. I don't get it. I have been taking photos all my life, including the last 18 years of negative-only photos of my family. Where are those negatives now? Beats me! They're down in the basement somehere in boxes...I think. If I needed them or wanted to get at them could I? Probably if my life depended on it, but not otherwise. They are lost to time, just like the many photos and negatives that my father took of our family when I was growing up. I suspect that unless you are a professional photographer with a highly organized filing system this is true of you, too.

Now, where are my digital negatives from the past 7 years? why they are all right here in front of me on my computer at my finger tips. Incluidng tripply backed up: once on a second drive on my computer, once on a portable, removable, external drive in my brief case, and once on Flickr. I think they may even be safe from nuclear war fare.

Will I be able to access them 50 years from now, the way you can with your negatives, if you are lucky enough to find any of them 50 years from now? Of course they will, because I won't wait 50 years to try to retrieve them. With each next generatiion computer purchase I will move them to the new technology, so it will be a slow evolutionary process, not a radical jump.

I use and love both film and digital. But don't tell me how wonderful negatives are for secure storage when I have a hard time finding the ones I shot three months ago. Thanks Heavens for that CD I got so I could at least put them online! 🙂

T.

I SO disagree with this opinion! But time will tell. I only know that I have negatives in a shoebox from my grandparents time that I can still print. Digitizing them by scaning either the negs or prints makes them easier to share, but the fact that I can still access them is because of the medium - film. I doubt that the same success rate will be experienced by my grandchildren if all my images were digital only. Simply my opinion. Like I said, only time will tell. Image storage on film at least has a proven track record. Isn't there some kind of crisis in the US government or museums due to image loss from digital media? I vaguely remember Bill M. writing about that once.

 

[jlw]

Isn't there some kind of crisis in the US government or museums due to image loss from digital media?

It's not so much a "crisis" as an ongoing management issue. My sister is a university librarian, and she says it's a major topic for groups in her profession.

Often the problem isn't so much the media as the means to read the media: A researcher wants to apply new statistical techniques to data gathered 30 years ago for somebody's doctoral thesis, and you've got all the data in the library... but it's on eight-inch floppy discs, so now you're trying to find somebody who still has an eight-inch floppy drive and a computer that will connect to it.

I seem to recall reading that the first big exposure for this issue was the 1960 US Census, the first census to be tabulated by computer. Lots of researchers would love to work with this raw data today -- but it's all on reels of magnetic tape in a no-longer-standard format, readable only on a handful of drives that exist now only in computer museums.

That should be less of a problem with today's media, since the media and formats most of us use for our photography are high-volume, mass-market products. But it does illustrate that as a photographer you have to be willing to be a good custodian of your own work, whether that means migrating your digital images to current media at reasonable intervals, or processing your negatives archivally and storing them properly.

 

[sf]

In the end, my images are all digital anyway. I have thousands of RAW files from my trip to Turkey and Greece. I have also many hundreds of scans of my negatives and slides. They are all stored in the same location on my giant portable drive. Come printing time, the only difference is how the prints look and how long it took to get the images prepped.

So really, I just shoot film because it offers me more megapixels per dollar of investment. At least, from a printing perspective. From a spiritual perspective, we all know the reason.

As far as storage, I have a huge 4 inch binder stuffed to the max with single cut 645 frames that I have shot in the last 4 years. I have scanned all my favorites with my Multi Pro, and I only take out the binder when it's time to stuff another roll in there, after I have scanned them. I keep the binder in a firesafe or a filing cabinet.

Now, as far as digital media is concerned, you have to keep things copied in more than one place and on different types of media. CDs and DVDs will eventually degrade or be scratched or lost. Losing a few thousand negative frames in a binder is alot harder than losing a DVD or two. Copying files over and over again will eventually lead to degradation...from what I hear.

Eventually, I will take a piece media (some very stable sort) and stuff all my scans of all my work on it. I will then keep that disc or drive or card somewhere separate from where I keep the film and the computer and all that. So, if the house burns down or I'm robbed, I won't lose years of work. A safe deposit box is a good idea.

 

[amateriat]

I always have to wonder out loud when people talk about the better physical security of negatives over digital storage. I don't get it. I have been taking photos all my life, including the last 18 years of negative-only photos of my family. Where are those negatives now? Beats me! They're down in the basement somehere in boxes...I think. If I needed them or wanted to get at them could I? Probably if my life depended on it, but not otherwise. They are lost to time, just like the many photos and negatives that my father took of our family when I was growing up. I suspect that unless you are a professional photographer with a highly organized filing system this is true of you, too.

As a freelance IT tech, I rememeber the pained look on numerous clients' faces when I had to break the news to them that their computer's hard disk was fried, then asked the still more-painful question, "did you back up any of your data?"

I've been backing up my data for a while with reasonable regularity. Assuming my backup HD and numerous CDs/DVDs happed to fail en masse, I'd still have my negatives and 'chromes to rescan, PITA as that might be. In the case of most of my clients, the files they lost were digital in origin, meaning whatever was on that HD was it, with no "fail-safe" in effect. People have the same devil-may-care attitude toward digital files as their parents did toward old negatives. Old habits don't die, but the artifacts of our existence, the vehicles of ancillary memory, contunue to, every day.


- Barrett

 

[sanmich]

When I got interested in didgital for my family stuff, I did a little homework, and that was my conclusions:
1- If you want to be sure to find old and very old digital pictures, you have to constantly backup, rebackup and re-re-backup them. skip 10 to 15 years and ALL your family memories are gone. Forget about discovering the 30~50 years old shoebox with all the wonderfull grandpa pix...(And I came to photography bacause of that shoebox in the first place). My idea is that 99% percent of people are not aware of the problem and will start to lose their pictures. Even if the idea will spread that digital need constant backups, a gap of 10 to 20 years (at least from the mid 90's to now) will disapear.

2- I though color negs are good at conservation. Wrong! I'm shooting family stuff on kodachrome now. In a stylus epic mind you...

 

[jlw]

Maybe this will turn out to be an answer:

DPReview report on Sandisk announcement of write-once flash memory

Apparently what they're announcing is a technology to make inexpensive flash-memory cards that can't be erased, allowing you to use the card as a permanent storage medium with a life of 100+ years.

I know, sounds almost like coming full-circle back to a digital version of film! Then again, that might not be such a bad thing... instead of constantly shuffling your growing files of images onto larger and larger hard drives and/or bigger collections of DVD backups, you'd just keep your working copies on your computer's hard disk and file the original cards away. I'll bet a lot of them would fit in a safe-deposit box...

 

[Doug]

Reading JLW's fine description of his filing and storage method gave me an odd sense of déja vu... Since I use a virtually identical system even to using a custom FileMaker database. It is SO satisfying to be able to easily put my hands on exactly what I'm looking for, it's worth the modest effort to enter the info.

 

[Tuolumne]

The idea with digital storage is to continually move up the technology chain. Any one-time archive of any digital information will likely fail to be readable at some future point in time. (Although I will note that that favorite bugaboo of critics of digital archiving, the 5 1/4 inch floppy, long deemed to be dead as the Dodo bird, is actually still available from a number of online sources.) But storage technology has moved way beyond the archived CD or DVD as the only way to reliably store data for the future, just as digital sensors have moved way beyond VGA resolution.

80GB-160GB external, portable, USB-powered, shock-hardened disk drives (as small as an iPod mini) are now available for $120-$250. You get one of these and keep it synched with your digital photos. When you get your next computer, you copy your digital photos to it from this external drive. As technology improves, be it write-once flash memory or holographic 3D sugar cube memory, or whatever, that becomes your new synching device. The idea is to keep leapfrogging the technology, not let an archive copy sit around for 50 years and hope it still works.

In any case, as has been mentioned above, the idea is redundancy and not relying on any single backup to save the day. People who are cavalier with their digital data are also probably cavalier with their negatives. They've got the pics, but they have no idea where the negatives are any more.

Is this perfect? No, but neither is image storage on celluloid which is subject to damage by water, fire, mold, mildew, fading, loss, and just plain old forgetfulness.

T.