Looks like Film may win over today's Digital Photography in the long run.

[LSiemens]

For me, it's a complex issue. On the one hand, I don't really care about the posterity of my photography and video. On the other hand, thinking back over my own lifetime body of work, preservation of my digital work has frustrated me more than my analog work has.

Analog:
I have nearly every negative and chrome (that I've chosen to keep) starting with my first Baby Brownie Special received as a birthday gift in 1953, through my Konica in 1962, Linhoffs, Hasselblads and Leicas in later years. Those "keepers" (from half-frame 35mm to 4x5s) fit in a single medium-sized desk drawer, neatly filed and indexed. There is no need to upgrade or copy them to a new format every few years, yet, I've been able to take advantage of every new analog and digital development to make wonderful images from them.

Digital:
I was an early adopter, with a 1/2 megapixel Canon around 1990, through a succession of quality digital cameras and camcorders since.

1. The early digital images are essentially worthless for their lower quality and resolution.
2. I, too, have lost digital projects to unreadable floppies, Zip Drives, CDs, DVDs, and most recently junked some hard drives no longer recognized by my newer equipment.
3. The resulting care and updating of the digital collection is a boring chore
4. And in the realm of video, on a recent move I chucked a garbage bin full of original VHS, Beta, miniDV, and digiBeta tapes of all manner of recording formats, as I no longer own any camcorders or decks that read them. The video "keepers" were all original rendered to various digital formats, some using codecs no longer supported, some on some SCSI raid array drives no longer easily mountable in my new workstations.
5. Over the years, digital photo cataloging software has come and gone, with a lot of my effort now lost through software obsolescence.

My favorite photo of my grandfather taken with my Brownie 55 years ago, is easily located, and scannable. My video interview of famed singing cowboy star Rex Allen, recorded just weeks before he was accidentally driven over by his driver and died just 15 years ago, is in a format that would be extremely difficult as well as expensive to now utilize. Gone also are my digital images from a trip to the Copper Canyon in Mexico and many other images I wish I could easily lay my hands on.

 

[OurManInTangier]

As a user of both film and digital I have concerns over suitable storage of both formats. I lost virtually every print and negative I had taken prior to the age of twenty two when my parents home was flooded and river water plus raw sewerage swept through. All the pictures of my time travelling, time at college and crappy pics shot as a child were lost forever.

Those negatives and prints since then have been stored as best I can but even my changing financial position over the years has affected how well my images have been stored. When starting out I simply didn't have the finances (or necessarily the knowledge) to ensure negatives were stored under anything like the best circumstances, with more cash to spend now I can afford better materials, understand better some of the issues and, despite no longer living next to a river, ensure all files and boxes are kept upstairs and on shelves 🙂 Perhaps I could and should be paying to have them archived, locked in a temperature controlled environment and have an art restorer check them every three years making any necessary restoration work?! While I've yet to suffer any losses with digital storage I realize that this is likely to be just as much in the lap of the Gods as losing images to a flood, despite my best efforts.

A greater concern may be what interest in, value placed upon and desire to retrieve (whether finding a way to read an outdated file or sitting down and scanning old negatives) these future historical images may there be for future generations? Perhaps they will look back at the first half of the 21st century and dismiss everything as the result of a faddish love (or indeed hatred) of accelerating technology and deem our entire output as nothing more than a worldwide surge in selfies and teenager's appendage shots.

Personally, I'd suggest once our egos are done only those among us with children should really worry too much about it (no children here so I know mine can be tossed aside,) whether the great great grand children have any interest in what some long dead relative did on their holidays probably isn't the issue here; just that if we can offer them a record of the past perhaps we should do all we can to ensure they have the choice.

 

[Sparrow]

... as I've said before ... Art is that which is curated ... if the work is good enough it will be conserved, whatever the format.

As is always the case the poor stuff will be lost, and a good thing too ... history is possibly as harsh an editor as there is

 

[Mackinaw]

Interesting and timely thread. I’m currently in the process of scanning hundreds of old B&W family negatives dating from 1910 (glass plate negatives) to the early 1950’s (120 and 35mm). Most were taken by my dad or his uncle. Storage was nothing fancy, all were in a box that sat either in an attic or basement for all those years. Will technology allow folks to keep digital images that long? I tend to doubt it.

Jim B.

 

[Godfrey]

May take the chance and remind to the people who were involved with computers in the 90's: Can you open your .LBM pictures that were so popular in the 90's? .PCX files are the same, although they are still supported by photoshop (let's see for how long). These were the most popular image file formats in the early-to-mid 90's until jpg came along.

Converting maybe files into a format which will be popular in the future? A digital archive of 40.000 pictures (if not more in some case) is not a simple task...

Hmm. I was very involved with digital images all through the 1990s and never saw a single .LBM or .PCX image file. All of the work I did went to .GIF, .PSD, .TIF, and .JPG formats. A few .BMP from machines running Windows snuck in there too, but I converted them to .GIF or .JPG as soon as I got them. My oldest original JPEG has a created date in June 1993.

My pre-2000 image file library has 70,000 images in it. I have long since converted all the GIFs to JPEG or TIFF format, and created a Lightroom catalog for them. I can convert them all to whatever current JPEG, TIFF, PNG, or PSD format by opening the library, selecting all, and telling Lightroom to export them to whichever format I want. Takes less than a minute to do, would take about fifteen minutes (at most) for the operation to be completed. Most of those old files are rather small...

G

 

[Godfrey]

Interesting and timely thread. I’m currently in the process of scanning hundreds of old B&W family negatives dating from 1910 (glass plate negatives) to the early 1950’s (120 and 35mm). Most were taken by my dad or his uncle. Storage was nothing fancy, all were in a box that sat either in an attic or basement for all those years. Will technology allow folks to keep digital images that long? I tend to doubt it.

Jim B.

Call back in 2090 and find out... ;-)

G

 

[Aristophanes]

The vast majority of any photos taken are inconsequential even to archivists after the author dies. Shoeboxes of photos are thrown away, hard drives erased.

If you think your photos are going to have substantial value after you are gone, that is wishful thinking. Enjoy them now and share them right away, archive a few with prints, but these expectations that they can and should have any cultural endurance of importance is juts hyperbole and fantasy. When your bits die they will likely die as well.

 

[willie_901]

VertovSvilova,

No fair writing a rational, informed post on this topic.

There's no fundamental reason digital media can not last as long as negatives, transparencies or printed materials.

The battle against entropy and change affects all media and requires effort and planing.

 

[willie_901]

...

BUT, a strong magnet could wipe a BluRay I would guess.
...

I spent around 30 years working daily around extremely strong static magnetic fields(~70K to 140K Gauss or up to 280,000 times stronger than the earth's magnetic field). I can assure you BluRay or other forms of optical storage media are not destroyed by magnetic fields.

Of course all magnetic-based storage media are damaged by static fields above ~5 G .

 

[Solinar]

Gosh, Stephen. This is a snore with an explosive title.

If you want your photographic work to survive, publish it. Once it's published, it doesn't matter whether it was film or digital capture at all.

Stuffing boxes and boxes full of prints is a poor way to seek immortality in photographs.

G

Godfrey - I've got a pre-1995 hole in my photographic past. During a tumultuous period after a divorce and my semi-nomadic wanderings in South Texas - one box didn't make it to the next destination, the one with my albums and negatives.

The only time I get to see some of those images from 1975 tp 1995 is when I visit some family members or old friends - who managed to stay put in one place. They're prints of course - but that's all that remains of twenty year period.

Best Regards,

 

[F6Roger]

All you guys and gals are missing the simplest solution.

Just be a crummy photographer like me. Then nothing you do will be worth saving anyway.

Nice one 🙂

 

[Solinar]

I spent around 30 years working daily around extremely strong static magnetic fields(~70K to 140K Gauss or up to 280,000 times stronger than the earth's magnetic field). I can assure you BluRay or other forms of optical storage media are not destroyed by magnetic fields.

Of course all magnetic-based storage media are damaged by static fields above ~5 G .

Unlike magnetic tape - I thought that DVD's and Blueray were optical storage devices.

Best Regards,

 

[Godfrey]

Godfrey - I've got a pre-1995 hole in my photographic past. During a tumultuous period after a divorce and my semi-nomadic wanderings in South Texas - one box didn't make it to the next destination, the one with my albums and negatives.

The only time I get to see some of those images from 1975 tp 1995 is when I visit some family members or old friends - who managed to stay put in one place. They're prints of course - but that's all that remains of twenty year period.

Best Regards,

I have a similar hole in my photographic past too. At one point around 2002, it was time to have the apartment I'd lived in for over a decade redone with paint, some repairs, new carpeting, etc. The building management had an empty unit on the same floor and we arranged that I could move my things in there for two weeks while my apartment was re-done. After I'd moved back home and put everything away, I discovered that two boxes of negatives and prints (mostly 1991 to 1996) had gone missing. All of the photos I made while living in Tokyo (1992-1993) are completely gone...

I still have a number of the images, though, because I'd scanned some of the negatives by 2002 and have them in my digital archives. And I found a bunch of negatives from my eight weeks sabbatical in Great Britain and Europe from 1996 that had been separated for scanning in a folder in my desk drawer too. (Yes, they're all scanned and archived now... 🙂

This experience has proven for me that, at least as long as I'm alive and able to maintain the archive, my photos are far safer in digital form than as prints or negatives. I've lost far more negatives and prints than I have any digital images.

After I'm gone, it's someone else's problem. ;-)

G

 

[David Hughes]

May take the chance and remind to the people who were involved with computers in the 90's: Can you open your .LBM pictures that were so popular in the 90's? .PCX files are the same, although they are still supported by photoshop (let's see for how long). These were the most popular image file formats in the early-to-mid 90's until jpg came along.

Converting maybe files into a format which will be popular in the future? A digital archive of 40.000 pictures (if not more in some case) is not a simple task...

Hi,

I think the word "simple" is wrong. Mass conversions are tedious and boring but little else. And most of us have enough sense to look after our files and convert when necessary. A pity the EXIF isn't so backwardly compatible. I've software kept just to read that from elderly (1997 - Gasp!) files...

Regards, David

 

[Dante_Stella]

This proposition would only be true if the original shooter made no effort to catalog or preserve his work. That said, I would offer these observations as to why this digital archiving phobia is overblown.

1. Although it is possible that, with a very small amount of server architectures, that the cloud is actually very vulnerable to attack, it is extraordinarily unlikely that millions of distributed storage devices would ever be wiped out all at once.

2. Any event that would achieve #1 for distributed devices would very likelym also destroy the electrical infrastructure required to view, output or convert film output for further use - and with it the transportation and water infrastructures that are critical to analog photography. I don't think holding your Kodachrome slide to the sky to view it is exactly winning any battle.

3. Digital formats have not changed since the mid-1980s. Most of the world's digital-only format exists in JPG and TIFF, both of which are now open standards and neither of which has changed since about 1990. That's 25 years, or essentially an entire generation. Photoshop and Graphic Converter provide plenty of support for every commonly used format in play since the 1980s.

4. File formats can be changed on an automated basis, and if you are doing it every 10-20 years, it is no different from making sure your kids aren't pitching your albums of prints.

5. Analog prints and materials (particularly older Fujicolor paper, Vericolor negative film, and Anscochrome slides) fade even under ideal storage conditions, and ironically, without digital restoration, could not be put back in order by a lab today.

It doesn't hurt to shoot both film and digital, but it's not a top-of-mind issue. The bigger thing is to document what you have shot so that in the future, people don't pitch things by mistake. And that goes for either medium. Vivian Mayer's stuff might have ended up in a dumpster.

Dante

 

[David Hughes]

Hi,

Interesting comment about media failing, my wife could crash one or two computers where she worked just by walking past them in the lab's and her plastic cards never lasted more than a few days. I put it down to her being extremely attractive +5G obviously.

BTW, I'm serious. It was only recently that her cards managed to survive as mine do. There was nothing in the lab's generating such a field, everyone checked and decided she managed it somehow. Of course, this old git can remember when being ill would make watches run slow or fast and no one believes me when I say that, either.

Regards, David

 

[mdarnton]

Don't count on the Library of Congress saving your work by copyrighting it. On their own site they state that they get 12,000 pieces a day, and only save what they think has value to them.

I have a bunch of negs from a ten-year period of my life that are well indexed and relate to the specific goal of a university archive and I'm talking to them about them taking it all at some point. I have a second body of work from the last 30 years that's mostly digital, but that will probably be OK, also thanks to the contents having broader interest than personal and needing to be accessed daily by people other than me. My personal work is personal, and I neither expect nor care that anyone will be interested in it after I'm gone.

 

[Lauffray]

You know I really don't care which medium outlives the other, as long as in 20 years I still have the choice to shoot film if I want to

I don't understand what's this obsession with permanence, you take your precautions but anything can happen to your archive whether digital or film. Computers can be stolen or crash at anytime, archival mediums become obsolete with time or are simply lost and we've all heard stories about all fires that simply erase everything

 

[pete hogan]

I think that the next two generations will rely on the Cloud for better or worse. Can't tell if they actually like my b&w that much, but I know my wife doesn't.

 

[Godfrey]

...

3. Digital formats have not changed since the mid-1980s. Most of the world's digital-only format exists in JPG and TIFF, both of which are now open standards and neither of which has changed since about 1990. That's 25 years, or essentially an entire generation. Photoshop and Graphic Converter provide plenty of support for every commonly used format in play since the 1980s.

...

The current format standards for TIFF, PNG, and JPEG date from a little later than that: approximately 1996 for PNG (Portable Network Graphics, a replacement for GIF—Graphics Interchange Format—which was designed and copyrighted by CompuServe), and 1992-1997 for JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Guild). (It's nice to know what the acronyms stand for now and then... 🙂

TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) was originally devised in the middle 1980s, but has been extended and enhanced quite a few times right up through the middle 2000s (lossless compression, layers, and other features). The currently most-used features of TIFF files today likely date from around 2004, but all the older files made with prior versions of the TIFF standard are readable as well.

DNG (Digital NeGative) format is essentially a publicly documented specialization of the TIFF standard designed by Adobe for digital camera raw data with open, no-cost licensing in perpetuity. It dates from 2004, when the proliferation of digital cameras outputting proprietary raw format files began to expand enormously, as a guard against the possibility of future obsolescence of raw format support. Note that Adobe is also the custodian of the open source TIFF standard as well, since acquiring Aldus assets a decade or more ago.

All of these—JPEG, TIFF, DNG, and PNG—are publicly disclosed format standards with lots of Open Source implementations available; all have active custodians continuing to develop them and maintain the standard and its compatibility; and none of them are hardware dependent. They stand the chance of remaining current for many decades to come.

- The problem of print and negative archiving is media longevity and storage facilities.

- The problem of digital archiving is maintenance.

G