Phil,
That's been pretty much an on-going topic around here.
RE storage, I'd bet on film up to the first hundred years. Unless it's email, and as we know it all gets stored forever somewhere in Nevada - so if you really want to save anything for posterity email it. The trouble with digital is that, as you pointed out, it has to be continually re-archived on a new media. That's all fine and good as long as someone's around to do it. I wouldn't count on that happening for most digital data.
It may be interesting to ponder the question of what someone would rather come across at a flea market sixty or a hundred years from now - a packet of negatives or a flash drive marked "YouTube".
AZ
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [SPAM] Ancestral photos
From: Philip Wayner <pwdloge@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, April 01, 2007 10:29 pm
To: List for Photo/Imaging Educators - Professionals - Students
<photoforum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
The thread on appreciating prints made many years ago brings up a point that can be a topic for conversation.A few months ago I pulled a negative from my file that was made more than sixty years ago and made a print in my wet darkroom. The negative was in prime condition and had weathered many years of storage.Today I opened a digital file of a portrait taken a few years ago. During that time it has been copied to at least three different means of storage from a floppy to my external hard drive. These are all very fragile means of storing valuable information. I have had computer crashes, Zip disks that suddenly lost all data, CDs that failed and back up on the external drive that became contaminated.Assuming that an image is to be archived digitally for a period of sixty years, as you might want for a family history, will it be available for someone in the future to make a print?At my advanced years this is really not a concern of mine, but it does illustrate that digital does not have the certainty of the simple negative. With a film archive that covers my professional years, there is a tangible record, I can still pull out a negative to make a print.I am not a "stuck in the past film user," I started using digital in my professional work with the introduction of the great Amiga computer in the 1980s. Many times in my work I combined the use the wet darkroom and the computer.It would be interesting to find just how many in the Forum are wet dark room users or dedicated digital users. There may be members who have questions on either process who can get answers from the talent that is in the Forum.Phil
