A very interesting commentary on using film

"But nonetheless, I am pretty certain that I will not be able to pull any of my CDs of digital files out of a box in 100 years and still have them be usable."

I think it's safe to say that he will not be pulling anything, film or CD's, out of a box in 100 years. It will, in fact, be he who is in a box. :)

Most glass plates are either broken, or hopelessly scratched and useless now. More negatives have not survived than have survived over the last hundred years, either from neglect or lack of interest.

As the writer noted, there is nothing permanent. I'm kind of tired of the argument that film is more "permanent" than digital. Either will survive only if someone thinks them important enough to preserve them.
 
Fred Burton said:
Most glass plates are either broken, or hopelessly scratched and useless now. More negatives have not survived than have survived over the last hundred years, either from neglect or lack of interest.
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Do you have some evidence to support these claims, or is it just something you have made up? I own plenty of glass negs that have survived multiple decades.
Anyway, the point of the original article is that traditional means of photographic capture have the special quality of being human readable. Pick up an ancient glass neg or piece of film, hold it to the light & you know what you are looking at. Like that writer said, you are seeing the trace of light that struck that material. This is something you don't get with digital. In the thrift shops of the future, will people go in & buy old hard drives to take home & try to connect & see what's on them? Perhaps, but I doubt it.
 
Yes, many negatives have been lost to the years. Thousands of 'snapshots' by families that finally get thrown out, the same with glass plates, some of which were stripped and used in greenhouses.
That essay made me think - the negative or plate I hold in my hand was 'there'! I have my Father's negatives from the time he started photography, about 1920. I also have my Grandmother's negatives from the time she started photography, about 1907. A few years ago my Brother printed some of Grandma's early photos. What a treat! I consider it a blessing to have these photographic records. I don't think that will happen with digital - but who knows?
 
Fred......You missed the point......the only equipment you need to look at the old photography is your eyes.....I found an old floppy disc not long ago in my file cabinet.... you know, the kind that actually did flop.....well it's useless and the data on it needs a machine to translate that doesn't exist any more and its only about 15 years old. Sure digital is fast and easy but like lots of technology it is highly dependent on stuff that changes very quickly.

Ray
 
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You're missing the point of this eloquent little piece of writing - I thought he went to great lengths to not irk people into the semantics of film verusus digital. He encapsulated how I feel about film too, except I never said it so well. It really is a real PIECE of something to have negative, glass or otherwise. It's a special experience that digital lacks. It's not a technical comparison - it's a subjective position on an aspect of film and I thought it was beautifully put. Thanks for posting MAC!
 
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.
 
At some point you would have transferred the data into CD-Roms or harddrive if they were important to you
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But at some point somebody won't, whereas with negatives nobody has to - one process is active and if someone breaks the link it's lost, the other is passive and can survive generations of being ignored.
 
williams473 said:
You're missing the point of this eloquent little piece of writing - I thought he went to great lengths to not irk people into the semantics of film verusus digital. He encapsulated how I feel about film too, except I never said it so well. It really is a real PIECE of something to have negative, glass or otherwise. It's a special experience that digital lacks. It's not a technical comparison - it's a subjective position on an aspect of film and I thought it was beautifully put. Thanks for posting MAC!
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Exactly! This is absolutely not about film/digital but about almost holding a fragment of the past in your hands and being able to hold it up to the light and see it. To quote: "The tangible nature. Being able to hold a piece of film that was struck by the very light that came off of the subject. " Also read the comment by his wife a little less than halfway down the page.

Rob thanks for sharing this!
 
You are all welcome! It just struck a note deep inside me because I happened to be looking at some old slides of my children from nearly 30 years ago, as well as some glass plates I inherited from my late father-in-law from England, taken around 1900. To me, there is something far more "soul-satisfying" about holding those negatives and plates than looking at my MacBook and the photos from our trip in August taken with the D300.
 
Insightful writing, left a comment on that picture. I sure hope this level of thoughtfulness will encourage a lot of young flickrites who saw it.
 
Rayt said:
. . . This is called an archival work flow - geek speak . . . .
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Sums it up really.

Now leave it in an attic for 100 years without a geek.

(Better still, put the geek up there too).

For me, the aleatory aspect of what survives, without care, is one of the greatest lessons of history.

Then again, what survives on line will be aleatory too.

Cheers,

R.
 
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What I like is also mentioned by the author. The fact that when I take out slides my father took while in Viet Nam, of his Army buddies and local temples and him and my mom on leave, I am holding the very same film, an object that was present when the picture was taken. Film that he bought, loaded in the camera, shot, took in for processing, and brought home. Pictures of my mother and grand parents. This very slide was present for that. It was there.

Every negative or slide out there was present at the event. Light reflected off my grandfather and struck this object. To me there is no greater recording than my own memories. Obviously the image itself is the thing that triggers the memories, but the object itself is a real and tangible link to that scene.

It's like looking at a 4000 year old sculpture from Egypt. I want to touch it. I want to run my hands over the same stone people worked so hard to shape and smooth to that exact form. I want to put my hand where the sculptor, 4000 mind-boggling years ago put his own hand, saying, "it is done in this spot. It's smooth and shaped properly and I like it."

Maybe it's just me.
 
The way I figure is that anybody with eyeballs and half a brain can look at a negative and see the picture. I'm sure that the technology will exist, SOME kind of technology, way off in the future to convert the negative image into a positive. The point is, you can actually SEE the picture. Will somebody far off in the future know that if you rotate a black plastic disc at the right speed it should be possible to "read" the vibrations it would make on a needle and hear music? And those little silvery discs? How the hell can they be read? Guess wrong? Is this one pictures, music, or simply data storage? We're cursed with analog brains, and they seem to function in an intuitive way when dealing with analog subject matter. On wedding forums folks are always seeking salvation after inadvertantly deleting their files or any of half a dozen other problems because one "film" card looks like the next whether full of images or not. Calling them "film" cards doesn't make them any more archival.

The silver prints hold up pretty good also. I've got a pair of 11X14 prints on my wall of old square rigger whaling ships, signed and dated 1906 and 1918. My son now has the family archives, including photos of my great grandparents from the 1890's. Sure, he could save storage space and scan them all. Fifty years down the road those enigmatic little silver discs would all be off to the landfill, a family's history gone forever. Yup, I'm a fossil, unwilling to jump on the digital bandwagon.
 
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.
 
Al Kaplan said:
My son now has the family archives, including photos of my great grandparents from the 1890's. Sure, he could save storage space and scan them all. Fifty years down the road those enigmatic little silver discs would all be off to the landfill, a family's history gone forever.
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This is why I always get a laugh when people ask me about the best way to scan all their old film so they can "archive" it.
I always say "Why would you want to spend your time and money on that? It's already archived!"
They usually think about for a second then realize I may be right.
 
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