talk about old times...or the power of images

[back alley]

searching out stuff in my basement today...i found an old leather portfolio with a bunch of old photos...a couple of portraits of an old girlfriend (actually we lived together) she was so beautiful...also some family portraits from when i used to do that for extra money...a lovely shot of 2 old friends, one of whom is no longer with us...a sentimental shot of a small sitting room in a cabin in peace arch park...some fringe theatre shots, a beach shot...a few band shots...a cute shot of marilyn & tom (old friends)...shots of a little boy who not much later died from cancer...wow!!!

 

[back alley]

no scanner...negs are deep in storage...re-photograph? maybe...

 

[nikon_sam]

The older the photographs the more valuable they are...you may not think too much of them the day after they're shot but many years down the road they become treasures...

 

[newspaperguy]

Strange you should post this... just as I "discovered"
(read: unearthed) some 8 X 10 prints taken on a troopship
(man's inhumanity to man) sometime during the Korean War.

Brings to mind - Shirley C. wondered to me whether there would
be any interest in a military photo gallery? I'm sure a lot of us
have old stuff, plus we have some reenactors on the list, too.

Whatcha think?

 

[FA Limited]

sometimes i wonder what things from my childhood actually look like compared to my memory. even trivial things like the gas station or the shopping mall or the land before condos were built on it. what seems mundane and dumb at the time could be valuable in the future. with digital humanity has been doing a worse job keeping track of history.

 

[back alley]

sometimes i wonder what things from my childhood actually look like compared to my memory. even trivial things like the gas station or the shopping mall or the land before condos were built on it. what seems mundane and dumb at the time could be valuable in the future. with digital humanity has been doing a worse job keeping track of history.

how on earth did you come to that conclusion?

 

[FA Limited]

feel free to discuss ... perhaps i have exaggerated

old print media was archived and shelved and always kept in hard copy in multiple places. drafts and paper work were kept. libraries kept vital historical collection. data archival was done by people who are trained to store information (i.e. librarians, historians, etc.)

with stuff being online and on everyone's computers unorganized and scattered. online work usually represents the final work product. older content routinely disappears never to be seen again. file formats are not permanent. stuff is everywhere sometimes hard to find and access. data is being stored in servers but not really for the purpose of archival but to be processed and mined when convenient.

 

[dubya]

The older the photographs the more valuable they are...you may not think too much of them the day after they're shot but many years down the road they become treasures...

True, and that's exactly why I dislike the "delete" button. In yesterday's "develop & print" world, unwanted images didn't usually get destroyed so hastily... they might even have ended up being the ones we treasure the most today precisely because they survived all that time, stored in a box, to be (or having been) passed down through the generations.

My digital image storage system is a nightmare... I thought lugging boxes of "real" work around was a chore?

Not to get off topic...🙂

edit: I tend to agree with what FA Limited said for the above reasons ... kinda sorta ...

W

 

[Shirley Creazzo]

As Rick Beckrich [newspaperguy] mentioned above I did wonder whether there would be any interest in military photos. Some members I questioned about this thought it might not be a great idea because of the international nature of the membership here. Another old=time member thought it might be workable if done with an explanation up front and some moderator scrutiny [much as I am reluctant to add to their workload.]

It just seems to me to be a shame if all those photos and all those events are lost to us when they were such a large part of all of our lives not too long ago.

Does anyone have any feedback as to whether or not this is a workable idea. Your opinions would be much appreciated. And of course no one is looking to step on what may be the sensitive toes of others.

????

Shirley C.

 

[back alley]

Strange you should post this... just as I "discovered"
(read: unearthed) some 8 X 10 prints taken on a troopship
(man's inhumanity to man) sometime during the Korean War.

Brings to mind - Shirley C. wondered to me whether there would
be any interest in a military photo gallery? I'm sure a lot of us
have old stuff, plus we have some reenactors on the list, too.

Whatcha think?

i would ask stephen directly...that is if you are talking about a military photo gllery here on rff.
i bet it would be pretty unique.

 

[Photo_Smith]

I was sorting through my prints last week, looking at old albums etc and I found a whole group of images, some of my parents who were younger then than I am now, my grandparents (who have now both gone) sitting and working in their beautiful garden. Lots of images 35+ years old including the first colour slides I developed myself when 14.

Be mindful that all comes to pass, the family images I take will be the bulk of what remains when I'm gone...

 

[KansanTim]

feel free to discuss ... perhaps i have exaggerated

old print media was archived and shelved and always kept in hard copy in multiple places. drafts and paper work were kept. libraries kept vital historical collection. data archival was done by people who are trained to store information (i.e. librarians, historians, etc.)

with stuff being online and on everyone's computers unorganized and scattered. online work usually represents the final work product. older content routinely disappears never to be seen again. file formats are not permanent. stuff is everywhere sometimes hard to find and access. data is being stored in servers but not really for the purpose of archival but to be processed and mined when convenient.

Related to this idea, I find the effect of the quantity of material on the archiving and preservation interesting. Considering a state historical society archive, there might have been only 2,000 photos taken in the state for a given year, if you go back far enough, and they will be interested in preserving any one of them they can get their hands on, no matter how mundane the subject. Move forward to a time after cameras are in the hands of the masses, and it could be 2,000,000 were taken in a given year. At that point, an archive might outright reject unseen most photo collections people try to give them, unless they are already sorted and cataloged, and then keep them only if they see some redeeming value in the content. I know of people that tried to turn in the slide collections of deceased relatives (1950's-1970's era photos) who were told not to bother unless each slide was labeled and dated, because there are no resources to dedicate to researching them and they already have representations of the era. Yet a set of glass plates that turned up in a barn attic were worthy of not only taking in, but dedicating a researcher to try to track down names of people and approximate years.

With modern digital cameras, where that number of photos in the state could well be 2,000,000,000 per year (or more, the exact numbers aren't important), I wonder how the archiving will be done. The funds for professional historians, librarians, and archivists are on a downward trajectory (often even for total funds, but certainly for per-capita) right as records to be sorted and stored are going up exponentially. How much stuff would need to be sorted through to find what is worth preserving? What is worth preserving? Perhaps one of old media's advantages was not so much keeping hard copies, but restricting quantity, so that the result was less like trying to drink from a fire hose.

 

[Haigh]

I agree that forgotten images when rediscvered can have a certain amount of power. I recently discovered a lot of my old images which were just some I made at the time and thought little of. Anyway I made a little book of them and sent them to my daughter and grand children so they can see what their mother looked like as a child and also see what their grandmother looked like as she had died before they were born. I am so glad I kept those photos.

 

[SausalitoDog]

That's why we still make prints, Joe.

They will probably outlive all the hard drives and dvds full of "files"

No matter how modern we have all become and how much more so the younger generation is, the old prints will be there for a long time.

Maybe they will only mean so much to us and no one else, but that might be enough.

 

[giellaleafapmu]

May I ask why are all people so negative about the ability to resist time of files? After all many of us use in a way or another some sort of byproduct of the UNIX system, which has been around for almost 45 years and I had the experience of print and negatives going bad too. Ansel Adams rephotographed a lot of Weston's work because it was on celluloid, had been any other photographer probably it would have got destroyed.

GLF

 

[SausalitoDog]

GLF

There is no question in my mind that digital files are as subject to damage or more so than negatives and certainly more than prints.

What have you done with the floppy drive backups, or the magnetic tapes or the early CDs? None of these are viable today and most of those backups are now worthless.

The same is nearly true with DVDs and who hasn't had an HDD failure...not to mention the file type. I have some old Kodak DCS raw files that are near worthless because I can't convert them to anything useable other than black and white - fortunately, the best of them I did convert to .tif or .psd when I printed them and I still have those files.

That said, if you stay up with changes and continue to migrate files as the technology evolves, you will be fine. But will your grandchildren have all the transition pieces? Just in one lifetime, we have lost the link to the files I mentioned above.

Of course, you are right that negative and print archives can be harmed, but those risks are known and have been managed for decades now. I think the negative thoughts you see in forums are meant to be cautionary tales that digital files need care and maintenance just as traditional ones do.

Happy July 4 !!!

 

[kxl]

1975 Classic

1975 Classic

Good morning, yesterday
You wake up and time has slipped away
And suddenly it's hard to find
The memories you left behind
Remember, do you remember

The laughter and the tears
The shadows of misty yesteryears
The good times and the bad you've seen
And all the others in between
Remember, do you remember
The times of your life (do you remember)

 

[giellaleafapmu]

GLF

There is no question in my mind that digital files are as subject to damage or more so than negatives and certainly more than prints.

What have you done with the floppy drive backups, or the magnetic tapes or the early CDs? None of these are viable today and most of those backups are now worthless.

The same is nearly true with DVDs and who hasn't had an HDD failure...not to mention the file type. I have some old Kodak DCS raw files that are near worthless because I can't convert them to anything useable other than black and white - fortunately, the best of them I did convert to .tif or .psd when I printed them and I still have those files.

That said, if you stay up with changes and continue to migrate files as the technology evolves, you will be fine. But will your grandchildren have all the transition pieces? Just in one lifetime, we have lost the link to the files I mentioned above.

Of course, you are right that negative and print archives can be harmed, but those risks are known and have been managed for decades now. I think the negative thoughts you see in forums are meant to be cautionary tales that digital files need care and maintenance just as traditional ones do.

Happy July 4 !!!

I don't want to be taken in the wrong way but I have back-ups of everything I ever had in a computer stored in several places and I have working floppy disc units if I need them. I know that files can be lost of damaged but so can negatives or even prints, especialy color prints. Of course, I agree that files need to be converted from time to time when there is a possibility that an old standard could disappear. I like film and I know that if properly treated it lasts long time but I don't see files as something with the fate to disappear. Also, computers get so much faster and better that what was considered once a lot of information is now something relatively small. It is really not that difficult to write a script and have all the 2.7Mpx raw images from an old D1 stored in a 1Gb card converted into some format such as tiff which is still easily usable. They can be stored then easily into a small portion of a cheap memory stick, no of ten such sticks to be kept into different places. I am not sure how easier or more difficult the archival work is for a large institution such as a library but for the average photographer it is just as time consuming as it was to do a similar work with negatives. Sure if I die and a memory stick is found in 40 years under a pile of junk in my office whoever finds it might have some problem with it but I think we are talking of the same chances that similarly buried negatives can be found well preserved in the same time. Well, I hope so at least... 🙂

GLF