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

[CameraQuest]

Film vs Digital is so last year - Today's Digital will likely lose.

see http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31450389

"Vint Cerf, a "father of the internet", says he is worried that all the images and documents we have been saving on computers will eventually be lost.

Currently a Google vice-president, he believes this could occur as hardware and software become obsolete."

So what if your life's photography work of 20 million images has multiple back ups on multiple hard drives -- if years from now neither your family or your friends will be able to access those drives due to changing technology? That might happen as soon as 30 years from now.

Thanks to a combination of changing programs, computer operating system and storage platforms, much data from the late 1980's is now inaccessible in practical terms. That problem will only get worse as newer technology evolves.

Contrast that with good old analog negatives and printing. Sure, it will be an elite art form by then, but they will likely be able to still see, handle, and print all of your "outdated" prints and negatives.

...who know what the future holds ... but its something to consider ..

Stephen

 

[FrankS]

: )

 

[p.giannakis]

I didn't have to wait 30 years. I cannot read the DVD's I backed up my digital shots back in 2005. This was the reason i switched to film.

 

[Godfrey]

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 didn't have to wait 30 years. I cannot read the DVD's I backed up my digital shots back in 2005. This was the reason i switched to film.

That's odd. I have all the CDs and DVDs I stored photos onto starting in 1994. They're all 100% readable now. Of course, there's little point since all of the data has been copied multiple times to more modern digital storage devices and the cloud.

G

 

[CameraQuest]

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

Yep, you are so right Godfrey.
Be sure to explain that to the lawyers fighting over Vivian Meyer's work.

Stephen

 

[Pherdinand]

All shots will be lost of this generation, so what, not a big loss🙂)

 

[sevo]

Well, print it, then - there are services that will print digital photography to traditional archival material (silver black and white, or C-Print/RA-4/Cibachromes for colour).

 

[Godfrey]

Yep, you are so right Godfrey.
Be sure to explain that to the lawyers fighting over Vivian Meyer's work.

Stephen

That's an exception. If Maloof and his partners hadn't happened upon her boxes and boxed of stuff, it would have gone to the dump and been destroyed, most likely. Because she, the creator, didn't see the point to taking care of it for the future.

Some stuff survives regardless, but are you going to base your life's work in photography on the chance that a John Maloof will discover it?

G

 

[Godfrey]

Well, print it, then - there are services that will print digital photography to traditional archival material (silver black and white, or C-Print/RA-4/Cibachromes for colour).

Current pigment inks and archival paper prints have even better archival properties than "traditional" archival photographic media, according to Wilhelm Imaging Research.

G

 

[CameraQuest]

That's an exception. If Maloof and his partners hadn't happened upon her boxes and boxed of stuff, it would have gone to the dump and been destroyed, most likely. Because she, the creator, didn't see the point to taking care of it for the future.

Some stuff survives regardless, but are you going to base your life's work in photography on the chance that a John Maloof will discover it?

G

Exception? Capa's Suitcase. And who knows millions of family photography archives that survive handed down in print and negatives to the next generation. But when that family archive turns into an old hard drive that is broken or can't be read by new technology, most of them will be recycled along with their history.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. But on this particular subject, I don't know of anyone more credible than Vint Cerf.

Stephen

 

[JP Owens]

My heirs can throw out my physical prints as easily has my hard drives. I'm unconcerned about what happens to my photos once I'm gone. I once lost years of prints and negatives when a temperature controlled storage facility I used burned down. Since then, I've simply not worried about posterity.

 

[Godfrey]

This is another anti-digital Pet-peeve of mine. An original that can be copied multiple times. Talk about losing value.

Photographs have always been reproducible, regardless of what media was used to record them. Unless you mean daguerrotypes...

G

 

[Pioneer]

I don't even assume my negatives will survive me. Over the years as aunts, uncles and grandparents have died I have seen boxes of negatives disappear into the hands of those who inherited them. I have no idea if they even continue to exist, some I know have gone to the landfill.

I do try to print those photographs, digital or film, that seem better than the rest but even this is no real guarantee. I think Godfrey is right. If published they develop a life of their own.

I wonder how many daguerreotypes were made in the early days and how many of those survive? I have no idea myself but I strongly suspect that it is a very small percent of those that were taken.

 

[John E Earley]

My heirs can throw out my physical prints as easily has my hard drives. I'm unconcerned about what happens to my photos once I'm gone. I once lost years of prints and negatives when a temperature controlled storage facility I used burned down. Since then, I've simply not worried about posterity.

Similar experience here. I lost almost 30 years of print, slide and negative images in a storage facility catastrophe.

Since there is not a huge demand for my photos now, I doubt there will be one later on 🙄

 

[Kwesi]

Film vs Digital is so last year - Today's Digital will likely lose.

see http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31450389

"Vint Cerf, a "father of the internet", says he is worried that all the images and documents we have been saving on computers will eventually be lost.

Currently a Google vice-president, he believes this could occur as hardware and software become obsolete."

So what if your life's photography work of 20 million images has multiple back ups on multiple hard drives -- if years from now neither your family or your friends will be able to access those drives due to changing technology? That might happen as soon as 30 years from now.

Thanks to a combination of changing programs, computer operating system and storage platforms, much data from the late 1980's is now inaccessible in practical terms. That problem will only get worse as newer technology evolves.

Contrast that with good old analog negatives and printing. Sure, it will be an elite art form by then, but they will likely be able to still see, handle, and print all of your "outdated" prints and negatives.

...who know what the future holds ... but its something to consider ..

Stephen

The key word here is "worried".
I disagree with him.
The very fact that there are fee based cloud storage services implies that the digital item being stored must continue to be available to the end user. Otherwise why bother to store anything, be it a couch or a Microsoft Word document?
Currently in the digital realm the onus is on the end user to keep legacy hardware or to migrate files to more current hardware. In the no too distant future there will be a growth industry that will provide this service directly to the cloud servers so that they can stay in business.
this is not a film versus digital debate it's much bigger than that.

 

[VertovSvilova]

fwiw, this isn't really 'new' news of course. And I agree it's not a film versus digital debate. Libraries and other institutions have been dealing with this for a long time with a variety of media. They usually operate on a 7-year plan which means assessing the stored media and determining whether it needs to be transferred onto more current media. Although a lot of them don't have the funds and resources to do so properly. What this article is about isn't promoting using film, but about developing a way to digitally retain software that is necessary for digital interpretation of data. i.e., 'digital vellum' http://www.cmu.edu/silicon-valley/news-events/dls/2015/cerf-news.html

Whether one uses film, digital, newsprint, books, etc., the issue here is proper preservation. e.g., modern Kodak color negative film will fade pretty quickly unless kept in a proper environment (stored at -4 degrees F.) Many institutions that store cellulose acetate film negatives (i.e., Kodak Safety Film) in non-environmentally controlled storage are finding those negatives deteriorating rapidly (acetate is still used; motion picture cameras can get destroyed internally if polyester is used and the film tears in-camera, although post production archival prints are produced on polyester for longevity purposes.) A friend of mine at the Los Angeles Public Library (one of the largest photo collections in the country) discovered a series of Ansel Adams negatives (Adams once had an assignment to photograph LA on 120 roll film) in a non-cold storage room, which were deteriorating due to the 'vinegar syndrome' of cellulose acetate film. A combination of transferring to a different film stock, and also scanning and preserving digitally was the only way to save some of them. And many institutions cannot afford large cold storage that's environmentally controlled. A lot of film (and print) collections are in danger of deteriorating. https://www.nedcc.org/free-resource...terials-identification,-care,-and-duplication

Today's news photographs are being produced digitally with no original other than what's printed in the newspapers. Those images are in danger of disappearing and can only be preserved when frozen (newspaper deep freeze storage.) Also Corbis has spent millions in preserving images in underground climate controlled storage.

I think the moral of the story is really more about preservation rather than 'which media' lasts the best. A lot of photographs no longer exist because they've either been lost, damaged, or deteriorated. Images, whether digital or analog need to be preserved properly. If one uses film and has invaluable images to preserve, it might be smart to also scan them and store the scans separately. And books can go out of print, too. But the point that Vint Cerf is making in that article is about preserving the software needed to make digital still be interpretable, and not using film as an answer; in respect to the current world of images it's too late for that anyway. "The OLIVE project led by Mahadev Satyanarayanan at CMU is a perfect example of the challenge of preserving meaning of digital objects over very long periods of time. That such a capacity is needed is surely unarguable. We already have examples of the loss of digital content, not because the bits are unreadable but because they are uninterpretable."

 

[Bille]

So what if your life's photography work of 20 million images has multiple back ups on multiple hard drives -- if years from now neither your family or your friends will be able to access those drives due to changing technology? That might happen as soon as 30 years from now.

I have a hard time believing 30 years from now someone comes up with something "all new" thats incompatible with everything else that was the internet and digital before and succeeds with that. It really doesnt make sense.

 

[thegman]

I am a film user, but I disagree that film is a better archive medium. Digital can be backed up 1000 times and each copy is identical, film cannot.

'Digital rot' is a problem of course because it's possible that we will not be able to read files in the future, because software is no longer available etc.

Technically, it's a non-issue, it's trivial to store image data in a way that is self-explanatory to read, so even if you didn't know the file spec, you could work it out in 10 mins.

However, nobody does, everyone stores data in the way their computer maker or camera maker tells them to, and that's probably a really bad idea if you care about archival over decades and centuries.

Computer data is simple to store and simple to read, if you do it correctly, but nobody does.

Same goes for film scans too of course.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

Part of the industry I'm in is with digital media archiving. I'll say - ten years.
After ten years it has to be moved to the current archival media.
Digital tapes might lasts longer, comparing to RAIDs of HDDs, but drives and supporting them fw/sw and companies might not to.
Some of our customers are using same HDD based storage as Google, Flickr and so on. Hardware, firmware is starting to crap out as earlier as within four years.