A very interesting commentary on using film

The only issue with archiving film is getting everything in one place. I have a winter project that is a bit beyond the shoebox. I also have negatives going back to my grandparents time as well as my own, and I decided to research proper archival materials so that my own children's children can have such an experience. I settled on (for 35mm film) Print File sleeves and Archival Methods binders/slip-cases to house the negs. Both products appear to be of the highest quality and should last at least a couple of generations.

Oh, and 40oz, thanks for that wonderful heartfelt post!
 
Rayt said:
Floppy disks, SyQuest disks, Iomega disks, optical magnetic disks didn't become obsolete over night. At some point you would have transferred the data into CD-Roms or harddrive if they were important to you. I still have pictures from the birth of my son taken with a Sony Mavica the one that takes floppies. This is called an archival work flow - geek speak not so different then putting negs into archival sleeves and cataloging them.
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Right, but the point is that with a negative or chrome you don't have do ANYTHING after putting a film original into a sleeve or other reasonable storage medium. Given the amount of digital images people tend to make vs. film, the difference in effort and expense is a consideration. And paying someone else to do it changes the cost comparison drastically.
 
ok, I am preparing for a small exhibit... computer crashed, bad hard drive. No problem, I have backup external drive. Buy a new computer and go to restore my image directories... two images are corrupted and are completely lost! Luckily, the one I want exists on a negative so I can rescan and print it tonight. Very luckily, none of my digital images were lost (that I know of)... I guess double redundancy is not good enough. How many copies are the digital only shooters maintaining?

I'm not talking 100 years, only 100 days.
 
I got an email from a woman at an agency in Boston a few days ago. She's putting something together for a client and needed pix of Seminole Indians. A quick Google search led her to some on-line images of my photos. The images included dates. I went out to the darkroom, pulled down a box marked 1974, and leafed through the contact sheets, picking out images that might be what she wanted. I filled some trays with chemicals, and an hour or so later had 11 prints drying on the screens.

True, there's no redundant back-up. The house could burn down. At this point it would take me months to scan everything in my files, and I'd have to scan everything. Too many times I've looked for and found a picture of a building long ago torn down, or a now well known person who was an unknown nobody when I shot it. Then every few years I'd have to copy all those files again, like I've got nothing else to do with my life.
 
Trius said:
Right, but the point is that with a negative or chrome you don't have do ANYTHING after putting a film original into a sleeve or other reasonable storage medium. Given the amount of digital images people tend to make vs. film, the difference in effort and expense is a consideration. And paying someone else to do it changes the cost comparison drastically.
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That's the real down side about digital photography. At work we have an IT department to safe guard the data and they have regular back up and all that. At home we are supposed to back up our data photography related or not and i am not someone who is diligent enough to do that with any regularity. So if I lose a month of work due to my own negligence then I can't place blame because the tools have always been available. When a writer types her manuscript on a computer I hope the standard procedure requires regular hard copy outputs just in case. Judging from my own bad habits I should be shooting film and I am 😱
 
allen_a_george said:
The problem of storing digital images is exactly what websites like the Kodak Gallery, My Picture Town, etc. are trying to address. Instead of you having to deal with archival issues, you pay someone elsewhere to do it for you. They deal with format changes, media obsolescence, and what not. You just take pictures.
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Good point, but given the way corporate entities tend to evaporate in the blink of an eye, this sort of reliance would make me just a bit nervous as well.

I have a foot in each world: I shoot most everything on film (and little bit with digital), then do all the post-shoot stuff digitally (scan/print). I dutifully back up stuff on decent optical data (for me, that would be Verbatim's DataLifePlus CDs/DVDs), and I'm thinking about a large RAID disk setup as well. But if all my storage schemes were to flame out, I'd still have the film to re-scan. PITA, for certain, but I could do it. Not so easy with digital capture. But, whatever you choose to make images with, you can't take too much for granted.

Thanks so much for this post/link, Rob.


- Barrett
 
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camp67col.jpg

Sleepaway camp, August 1967. Oldest surviving photograph taken by me (that I know of).

Technical: Diana, Verichrome Pan (what else?).


Time it was
And what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence
A time of confidences

Long ago it must be
I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They're all that's left you

- Paul Simon (from roughly the same time, interestingly enough).


- Barrett
 
How many copies are the digital only shooters maintaining?
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I'm not a digital shooter at all, but I scan all my negs and slides.

I keep them on a redundant RAID server, and I regularly make a backup of that onto another hard drive (and I store that backup at my sister's house). I also keep copies of all my favourites on another computer in a different country.

So that's three copies (2xRAID plus backup) of all my scans, plus an extra copy of all the ones I think are worthwhile. (And, of course, the film originals).
 
This is a discussion of what could be called "photo exceptionalism."

A few years ago I saw an exhibit of architectural drawings by a 14th century Venetian. On a few of the original sketches he had made notations in the margins. Somehow I was struck by the intimacy those notes gave the sketches and truly felt that moment of connection with the past. I felt the touch of a human hand and pen to the paper centuries ago.

I'm just saying that it is not just photographs that evoke these feelings. We can feel this way about old vinyl records, toys, and almost anything of some age.

Perhaps the question is two fold. One: Why do we feel this way about older things? Two: Will our descendants get nostalgic about CDs and the Internet?

Hawkeye
 
I have no problem using digital media and storing digitally and while I suspect technologies will change in such a manner as to require storage formats to change, I really do not care or think thats necessarily a problem.

If people value my work sufficiently they will find a way to keep it. And I think that will become so much easier in the digital world.

Two reasons - First, I recently had to rationalise my storage of films so I went thru my collection of negatives and prints - a couple of large plastic storage bins and threw 95% of them away. To be sure I kept the best (and these of course, I digitised!) But who is to know what people will think is valuable in 100 years. Ephemera like old photos that I think are inconsequential snapshots can be of tremendous value to social historians of the future. But, and heres the point, while film might be capable of lasting a long time, will people bother to do so when the result is an uncatalogued mess of photos that takes up a huge amount of physical space. I think not. For the vast majority of us, there is little prospect that we will have the discipline to store adn catalogue all of thats stuff in archival conditions. And even if we do - will our kids carry this on?

Here is the second point which further demonstrates this. Photography runs in my family (it seems) and my grand dad made hundreds, perhaps thousands of photos on glass plates in the early 1900's. These would have been wonderful images of his travels as a young man. What happened to these? In the 1960's or 1970's my mother did the same as I did with my old prints and negatives a year or so ago. They were taking too much space and were deteriorating so were consigned to the rubbish bin.

Digital photos have their problems but they also bring with them the chance for much longer existence simply because they are so much more convenient to store. IMHO that is!
 
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I think that you may have contradicted the point you were trying to make when you talked about the hundreds of glass plate negs your mom trashed. My heart dropped at that point, yet you did the same thing by trashing 95% of your negs. At least you attempted to keep the best.
 
...which is exactly why people run across my photos on the internet and want to know (A) can I still supply a print and (B) do I have more photos of the person/people/event. Even at an event where dozens of photographers shot thousands of rolls of film, like a 1960's era rock festival, how many of those images still survive, and can they be readily located? Things like a well known sixty-something author, poet, art critic, former actor in Andy Warhol films, when he was a 14 year old kid leaping like a gazelle in front of the Boston Public Library? Even newspapers "purge" their files from time to time.

I posted a photo of an artist and his wife on my blog last year. I knew them when they lived near me 40 years ago. He's now dead but his widow was googling his name, found my on-line images and wanted to purchase some prints. Yes, I still have the negatives. Another woman, an art dealer in Chicago saw them and wanted to know if I had any of his paintings. A small pen & ink drawing with a bit of water color that I gave to my son last year, part of a series he did of orthodox Jews in Belgium, is worth about $10,000. Based on recent auction prices a water color from a series of pictures of his wife is now worth perhaps $20,000 and an oil painting I have is in the $30,000 to $50,000 range. When I got them I swapped them for photographing a whole bunch of his paintings. The art dealer wanted to know if I was interested in selling them.

Last week I sold ten prints of Miccosukee Indians to a woman in Boston. She was googlig "Miccosukee Indians" and came up with my name. I still have the negatives from 1973/1974. I printed up the ones she wanted.

Never throw anything away.
 
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Peterm1 brings up an interesting point. I have 20 years worth of slides and negs sitting around in boxes and this is becoming a problem. For a while I have elected to shoot slides just because I can throw away the bad ones to lighten my storage load. I prefer to keep negs intact though I don't know why. I have thought about cutting up negs and mounting the keepers on slide mounts and throw away the rest just so I can better organize them. Since I am not ever going to do another wet print and the mounted negs can be scanned so why not? Do people mount b/w negs?
 
Rayt, B+W negs, in neg sleeve pages, in binders, don't take up that much room. Going through all my negs and mounting some of them would be a daunting task.
 
Slide mounts don't show the entire area of image on the negative. They crop a couple of mm in each direction so the automatic cutter/mounting machine doesn't need to do a perfect job of sticking the pictures in the mounts. Make contact sheets of your negatives and use them to identify the images.

I'll repeat "Never Throw Anything Away". As an example, many years ago I got an assignment to shoot some pix of a young female attorney. I think the story was not so much on her as just the fact that women were starting to be accepted by law schools, but what made her stand out was that the State Attorney's office had hired her, a first. Circa 1970 very few women were becoming doctors and lawyers. The photos were nothing special, B&W and maybe half a roll of frames at most. It really wasn't a big story at the time, a filler, and could have been bumped by any number of more important news events.

What makes those old worthless negatives valuable? How many other photographers photographed a just-out-of-law-school Janet Reno? And of those, how many can still locate the negatives. Of course I must also have pictures of another big bunch of young lawyers who will spend their entire lives in the obscurity of divorces and traffic court, but I have the negatives and contacts just in case.
 
FrankS said:
I think that you may have contradicted the point you were trying to make when you talked about the hundreds of glass plate negs your mom trashed. My heart dropped at that point, yet you did the same thing by trashing 95% of your negs. At least you attempted to keep the best.
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Frank my point is that I had no choice. Either get rid of 95% of my old negatives and unused prints.......or of course I could have just gotten a new wife. I decided that getting rid of the prints was cheaper. :^)

With digtal the issue does not really arise. Hard drive storage (and perhaps in 10 years time, solid state storage) is sooooooo cheap I will just keep all of my old unused second rate images. Perhaps my great grand kids will like them.
 
digital images that are neglected for 50 years will be essentially be gone (in 25 years there will be no USB plugs etc.), but the beauty of prints is that even after 50 years of neglect they are still something and may be rediscovered. I think archival prints are the most important part of being a personal photographer... whether you are shooting film or digital.

>>If people value my work sufficiently they will find a way to keep it.
 
There were literally billions of photos made during the film based 20th century. I would be surprised if more than 10 or 20 percent have survived. I suspect about the same percentage of digital images will make it into the 22nd Century. If not, it will be because we just don't value photos as much as in the past.
 
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