Has digital.... ???

[user237428934]

Once again so many false assumptions when talking about the ole times. The biggest one is that high quality film cameras are replaced by cheap p/s digital cameras.

True is: The average Jane/John Doe had a film p/s camera and exchanged it with a digital p/s camera. So there is no loss here. Many years ago the average print quality of normal photo prints was really bad. Nowadays an average digital print has a much better quality. So the vast majority of average snappers have a huge benefit from digital cameras regarding photo quality.

You make such a fuss about lost digital files. Yes, many will be lost, but do you really think that the majority of snappers care about lost digital photos? That's absolutely not proven. Perhaps I only know exceptional snappers but they still make prints of the most important photos and tape them in an album like in the ole days. If the digital photos would get lost, the average snappers I know wouldn't care.

My conclusion is that for the majority of photographers digital is a huge benefit regarding quality. This may not be true for more ambitious photographers or people visiting RFF.

 

[sjw617]

Has digital RUINED photography for the average person?

.

No. Digital has brought photography to the average person. It has freed them from worrying if there is film in the camera (since they used it during the last holiday / occasion). Cell phones and point and shoots have given photography to the masses. Photography has exploded since the introduction of digital cameras (good or bad).

Steve

 

[sjw617]

What you mean is not photography. It is digital moment capture with toy and fun products.

If we don't start to differentiate between a craft (art) and a brainless and hassle free (really?) capturing for fun, family or events, digital actually ruined photography.

I will give you that the explosion is snapshots but photography none the less. There is a fine line (very fine) between craft and brainless (your word) picture taking. Yes there are millions of pictures taken each year that mean nothing to most of the world but mean something to the taker and family and/or friends.
How has digital ruined photography? By letting 'the masses' take shots that have meaning to them?
I really think the bigger issue is posting them to flickr or social media. People have little editing skills and post millions of pictures and most are not good (composition, exposure, focus). That issue all over the place - flickr, social media and photo sites.

Steve

 

[user237428934]

That's the point.

What about sticking to the term 'photography' for the meaning of the traditional craft and use the term 'shots' for digital mass images? That would be something I could live with 😀

I have a better Idea. What you do is "art", what I do is "photography". That would be something I could live with.

 

[Stuart John]

Well as with everthing there are good and bad points that digital has given to photography. For alot of people digital has given them the control over their images especialy color that in the past was only enjoyed by the few. Digital has enabled us to alter images, restore old images and do many things that were very difficult in the tradtional darkroom and impossible to do with standard machine printing.

On the other hand digital has made us slaves to the computer. Most of us won't even consider taking our digital files straight from the camera and giving the JPG files to a lab for printing. Today we want to color correct everything before we even send it to the lab.

Constant software upgrades. When we buy a new digital body we find that our new RAW files won't open with our old software. We then find that the new software just won't run properly on our old computer either because our new RAW files are much bigger or the new software just got more bloated and requires a faster processor.

A B&W darkroom is rather simple, an enlarger won't crash and take all you images with it. The simple enlarger is easily fixed. Even when you change from an old F2 or M3 to a modern R9 or F6 that old enlager will still work and allow you to print your negs. It does not need a software upgrade and then slow down to the point of being unusable. The B&W enlarging paper looks great in any light and it does not suffer from bronzing either.

There are many other pros and cons and at the moment we are lucky to be able to enjoy both film and digital photography.

 

[igi]

Online file storage infrastructure needs to be renewed from time to time, it also needs a lot of energy. It's fine while people pay for it. I mean, if someone will get tired paying for it after 10 years, where will go that pictures? I guess they will be just deleted, forever unless mighty Google will not secretively buy such orphaned pictures in bulk for peanuts before deletion from online photo sharing services.

Yes they'd need to be renewed but as long as digital images are made up of 1's and 0's, it wouldn't be difficult nor expensive to do that.

From a business perspective, it's a good idea to buy a closing online photo album. You not only have instant clients, but you also have what you need for social engineering. I bet that would be the trend later on for these online photo albums. The business prospect alone makes them reliable enough as long as we have capitalists.

In a word - are you ready to pay for company which will keep your pictures available? If you want your kids and grandkids looking at your digital pictures, be prepared to pay until end of your days. I'm not saying this is particularly bad, it's just fact - you can't store media in basement and hope 30-50 years later someone will just plug it in and go through pictures.

People have already been paying for albums for all their life since the invention of the camera. Plus, I think $24 a year is cheaper than all those photo albums and you don't need to worry about misplacing them or the space they take up. Just remember your password though...😀

In the next 30-50 years, we'll have a different version of that "stumbling across the basement to find 50 yr old photos" scenario.

In the next 30-50 years, we'll have something like "I typed my grandpa's name on Flickr and I saw all his photos!" scenario🙂

 

[Nikon Bob]

What you mean is not photography. It is digital moment capture with toy and fun products.

If we don't start to differentiate between a craft (art) and a brainless and hassle free (really?) capturing for fun, family or events, digital actually ruined photography.

Nothing like artists wringing their hands in angst simply because the peasants are having some fun in the same playground. There is room for all of it in photography and there certainly are distinctions, always have been, between different forms of it.

Bob

 

[Sonnar Brian]

Anyone making a photograph is engaged in photography. Whether it is a 116 Box camera, Kodak Easyshare camera, or Leica M9ti. It is a wide-spectrum term.

 

[__--]

All I can say is this is sure a boring thread. Here's is a film photograph followed by a digital one, both of which I like, which is just as irrelevant to the real world as else anything else in this thread — and that, I suppose, makes my post here relevant; but televant to what? Actually, I just asked myself why I'm posting this — and all I can think of is that it's in penance for reading this whole thread...




Bangkok | Leica M6 | Summilux-50 pre-ASPH | Tri-X at ISO 1000 (?)

Bangkok | Ricoh GXR/A12 | 50mm EFOV | ISO 800 | f/8.0 | 1/1000 sec

—Mitch/Paris
Scratching the Surface

 

[muf]

Digital is more convenient for sure but convenient for what exactly? Convenient that you can shoot many more pictures. Well, depending on how good you are and how good the equipment is, then you could just end up with more poors shots. That leads me on to whether it's more convenient in that you only have to print what's good. But then, if there are more poor shots then you will be more likely to store them on your HDD and not print them off at all. Now that brings me on the the lower amount of printing going on. I notice that many of the printing outlets appear to have less customers. Is this due to people printing at home and not printing at all? I think so! The death of many of the photographic processing firms is not far away in my opinion. Digital sure as hell hasn't given them more work and is probably the reason why most still process film. 10 years ago, you'd go to have your photo's developed and the shop would be chocca full. Nowadays your lucky if there are 2 or 3 people in there.

Paul

 

[sc_rufctr]

The relevance is that the film image you posted will still be viewable in 40 years time. (Making some assumptions about proper storage).
Will the digital still be around in 40 years? Who knows? Does it even matter? 😕

All I can say is this is sure a boring thread. Here's is a film photograph followed by a digital one, both of which I like, which is just as irrelevant to the real world as else anything else in this thread — and that, I suppose, makes my post here relevant; but televant to what? Actually, I just asked myself why I'm posting this — and all I can think of is that it's in penance for reading this whole thread...




Bangkok | Leica M6 | Summilux-50 pre-ASPH | Tri-X at ISO 1000 (?)

Bangkok | Ricoh GXR/A12 | 50mm EFOV | ISO 800 | f/8.0 | 1/1000 sec

—Mitch/Paris
Scratching the Surface

 

[__--]

The relevance is that the film image you posted will still be viewable in 40 years time. (Making some assumptions about proper storage).
Will the digital still be around in 40 years? Who knows? Does it even matter? ...

Now, this is so absurd that it's funny.

—Mitch/Paris
Tokyo: It is love by people and special thanks for you

 

[sc_rufctr]

Now, this is so absurd that it's funny.

—Mitch/Paris
Tokyo: It is love by people and special thanks for you

Please explain. I'm trying to understand your point of view.

 

[JayGannon]

Yes they'd need to be renewed but as long as digital images are made up of 1's and 0's, it wouldn't be difficult nor expensive to do that.

People have already been paying for albums for all their life since the invention of the camera. Plus, I think $24 a year is cheaper than all those photo albums and you don't need to worry about misplacing them or the space they take up. Just remember your password though...😀

In the next 30-50 years, we'll have a different version of that "stumbling across the basement to find 50 yr old photos" scenario.

In the next 30-50 years, we'll have something like "I typed my grandpa's name on Flickr and I saw all his photos!" scenario🙂

We have online photo albums where we can store digital images and as ridiculous as it may sound, I do believe they can last a hundred years there.

IT infrastructure and planning is a lot more reliable as anyone could think.

You have no idea what your talking about, data centre infrastructure is fluid, expensive and not easy at all, as a result most are badly planned and have a very bad service history.
So when a DC that has no disaster recovery provisions (upwards of 80%) succumbs to a natural or electrical disaster its gone. Everything stored there is null and void. As for lasting for 100 years, not many companies last for 100 years, the internet is not some magical tub in the sky, if a company goes down tomorrow their data goes down with them if they cant pay their bills, its happened many times in the past. Imagine what would happen if Facebook/Flickr went offline tomorrow, the world would lose somewhere in the region of 8 Billion photos. Not as likely to happen if their in your cupboard at home.

In summary storing photos online (not talking about home sotrage of digital photos) is both expensive, risky, unreliable and unproven. If its cheap/free its cheap/free for a reason.

 

[Sonnar Brian]

Honestly Dave, all loss of digital data can always be attributed to human error.

Face it Flounder, you trusted us.

 

[Peter R]

The relevance is that the film image you posted will still be viewable in 40 years time. (Making some assumptions about proper storage).

Simply change the word 'film' to 'digital' and the statement is still perfectly true. So don't worry too much about it.

 

[flip]

Digital has made photography available to more people than it has ruined it for. Whether it is a style of photography that appeals to you is a matter of taste.

 

[igi]

You have no idea what your talking about, data centre infrastructure is fluid, expensive and not easy at all, as a result most are badly planned and have a very bad service history.
So when a DC that has no disaster recovery provisions (upwards of 80%) succumbs to a natural or electrical disaster its gone. Everything stored there is null and void. As for lasting for 100 years, not many companies last for 100 years, the internet is not some magical tub in the sky, if a company goes down tomorrow their data goes down with them if they cant pay their bills, its happened many times in the past. Imagine what would happen if Facebook/Flickr went offline tomorrow, the world would lose somewhere in the region of 8 Billion photos. Not as likely to happen if their in your cupboard at home.

In summary storing photos online (not talking about home sotrage of digital photos) is both expensive, risky, unreliable and unproven. If its cheap/free its cheap/free for a reason.

You have no idea how good DC's are. It is SOP for DC's to have disaster recovery plan. One of their solutions for example is to have another DC in another location that mimics the original DC.

Only a large enough disaster, something the covers a really, really large area can kill all those information. But if that disaster happens, all your film and photo albums might as well be dead too.😛

As I have said, online photo albums being a lucrative business is enough to give them a long enough lifespan. If an online photo album closes, why not let another company take over it's data? I'm sure it's a good option for that another company.

Digital photos having no tangible "negatives" are not a downside of digitalization of photography. It simply has a different set of needs in order for it to be taken care of to last a long time. People need to catch up with how to properly take care of digital photos just as how people caught up on how to take care of negatives. It's possible that there are also millions of photos lost during the time that photography was new to the masses because of improper storage of negatives.

 

[JayGannon]

You have no idea how good DC's are. It is SOP for DC's to have disaster recovery plan. One of their solutions for example is to have another DC in another location that mimics the original DC.

Thats what disaster recovery is, and its most certainly not SOP in any colo house or 75% of dedicated facilities.

Only a large enough disaster, something the covers a really, really large area can kill all those information. But if that disaster happens, all your film and photo albums might as well be dead too.😛

Not if the DC is single homed and/or has no DR plan.

As I have said, online photo albums being a lucrative business is enough to give them a long enough lifespan. If an online photo album closes, why not let another company take over it's data? I'm sure it's a good option for that another company.

Its not that easy, usually the servers have been siezed and sold as compensation for creditors before anyone would consider buying the IP on a photo album company.

Digital photos having no tangible "negatives" are not a downside of digitalization of photography. It simply has a different set of needs in order for it to be taken care of to last a long time. People need to catch up with how to properly take care of digital photos just as how people caught up on how to take care of negatives. It's possible that there are also millions of photos lost during the time that photography was new to the masses because of improper storage of negatives.

Yes but online file storage is not that solution.

 

[Lukino]

This thread puzzles me... I think most you guys are not that old, yet you ramble like the old men playing cards in a bar.

Digital lowered the average quality of photos? Take a step back and look at the big picture: today billions of picture are taken every day, no wonder that there is a huge pile of crap around... yet, every day i spend looking pictures on the net, i also see some beautiful, inspiring shot I'm happy I didn't miss. Slowly, crap will flow away, but even if lot of new ****ty pics will follow, the good ones will find their way to stay.
And unsurprisingly, it is always been this way! Go open your granpa box, keep the pics around, let the nostalgia step away and you'll realize that most of them are boring, forgettable, not good at all. And that the very good ones are those that were already moved in his night table, or scattered around the house on the wall next to the fireplace.

Two cents on storage too: surprisingly, lot of negatives taken by mankind were lost. Most of them. Destroyed by floods, quakes, mice, humidity but mostly thrown away.
If you plan to keep it, saving data is much easier and safer: just keep it in (at least) two different places! Like, a copy online and one in your pc, or in two different disks and if you lose one copy just make another one. Easy, cheap, failproof.