How Will Folks View Your Photographs?

Excellent! Prints live. Will there be family photos 50-60 years from now? People put them on their devices and some never make prints. Pix die when the devices die. Some members of my family make photo albums -- thankfully.
 
Yeah, that's a good point. I have barely printed any digital work, and have the usual prints for my film images. As time goes on, I'll print my best digital work from over the years and make albums, or even have photo books printed.

As for digital storage, I regularly migrate all computer files to the latest technology. At the moment I have many harddrives of multiple terabytes, but in the past it has gone from floppy disc to Imation Super disc to CD, DVD and now harddrives. As solid state drives become cheaper, my work will likely migrate there, unless something more suitable is introduced.

The importance of data migration was made clear to me when I was uploading all data CD's to a harddrive. At least ten CD's were no longer readable, and the data was lost. The CD's were about ten years old, and the so-called archival quality Kodak Gold. They were dead. Had I uploaded their contents earlier, the data would have been safe. Now I have multiple redundant backup drives, and I move to bigger and bigger HDD's as time goes on.
 
one of these days, i'll write an article titled "digital preservation for photographers," or maybe "personal digital photography archiving."
 
Prints give your work credance. Up until the image is in tangible form, it is just another digital capture. I share prints whenever I can espescially with family living far away. They know that I shoot film, but society is such these days that pics shared on Bookface or Instagrab have a limited lifespan and are quickly forgotten. Framed prints are proudly displayed and admired, at least in my experience.
 
I really don't get why people can't appreciate that current data storage methods are what we use now but it's very unlikely that they will be what we use in the future. The disc system was left behind some time ago and what we use now will be superseded by something better again. Digital technology has some way to go before it reaches any perceived bump stop and I also suspect that we will have the technology to restore all sorts of corrupted and damaged information files in the future. Prints that are one hundred years old would have needed to have been stored in ideal conditions to survive as would negatives. Throw a memory stick into a draw in the basement and it will be fine unless the place burns down or gets washed away in a flood ... your print or negative in the same storage situation will quite likely be seriously degraded and long past it's original luster as the years go by.

This is an argument that has been going on as long as I've been at RFF and there is never a winner!
 
Keith said:
I really don't get why people can't appreciate that current data storage methods are what we use now but it's very unlikely that they will be what we use in the future. The disc system was left behind some time ago and what we use now will be superseded by something better again. Digital technology has some way to go before it reaches any perceived bump stop and I also suspect that we will have the technology to restore all sorts of corrupted and damaged information files in the future. Prints that are one hundred years old would have needed to have been stored in ideal conditions to survive as would negatives. Throw a memory stick into a draw in the basement and it will be fine unless the place burns down or gets washed away in a flood ... your print or negative in the same storage situation will quite likely be seriously degraded and long past it's original luster as the years go by.

This is an argument that has been going on as long as I've been at RFF and there is never a winner!
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In general - yes. In practice - I have some family photo albums on the shelf that I have not touched for 20 years, but I know I can open them and I see the photos. If I forget a digital media in my drawer for 20 years I am not sure if I am able to "open" it (e.g. floppy is a good example). Physical storage conditions and technological incompatibility are quite different issues...
 
easyrider said:
Excellent! Prints live. Will there be family photos 50-60 years from now? People put them on their devices and some never make prints. Pix die when the devices die. Some members of my family make photo albums -- thankfully.
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Actually I think we're going to an even worse trend. People don't put their pictures on their devices, they put them on company servers and "clouds".
When these companies go out of business - even Facebook and Google will shut down their servers one day - everything on their servers is lost, and the content creators cannot do a single thing about it.
 
My wife and I have purchased a few unused, vintage (60s, 70s) photo albums to place photos in. I also have everything digitally saved, of course, and all the negatives in binder sleeves in a binder. I hope one of those three will survive the test of time.
 
Keith is right in some way that the point that film's hallowed survival is over-stated. Not present in this by virtue of impossibility is the witness of those negatives and print irretrievably lost to time. Undoubtedly, these out number those that survive... just as will prove true in the digital era. Four people will keep their files current and so, too, will some of the museums. The rest...?

Digital just makes it clear that unstable technology faces obsolesence risks we never really had to think much about with film...although there were those glass plates. And we've already survived (and not) a few disappearances. But film also faces some hurdles. In the future, among the hurdles it may face lie in the disappearance of the technologies on which it depended. Thankfully, this will probably be a problem for my great grandchildren... rather than something current.
 
The 10 year old photo looks like an external device to use 3.5" hard floppies. It must be before USB external hard drives were around.

I remember, with the 5.5" floppies swamping them out just to load a program!

Anyone here, years ago, use Lotus 123?

What Photoshop number did you first start using? For me it was CS2 as I recall. I found it to be time consuming learning it, mostly on my own, but, for me, it's about blending and layers. Each task can have several roads to take for the same result. Anyone here write any actions? When I had my business I wrote an action with my logo to put on photographs in a certain area and batch process, to be more productive and do things I thought would be better use of my time.

As a side note Keith I didn't intend it to be an argument! I do have b&w negatives my grand parents made and they are close to 100 years old. Funny the costumes and props like the cars in some of them!
 
The ten year old device is a zip drive that used zip disks. And actually that was beyond obsolete even 10 years ago.

I can't remember which Photoshop number I first used, but it was long before the CS days.
 
i have multiple back up system for my files. But I made myself a rule: for each time I take photo at least one has to be printed!
robert
 
Thanks!

Oh yes, zip drives, weren't they able to fit in the same slot as 3.5"?

Some real nostalgia, for us boomers, have you watched the movie, "Hidden Figures?"
 
Valdas,

My wife started at Coopers, in the 1970's!

She is semi-retired now. Of course, that means she is down to around a 40 hour work week!
 
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