--- On Wed, 4/30/08, David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > From: David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b@xxxxxxxx> > Subject: Re: photo storage question > To: "List for Photo/Imaging Educators - Professionals - Students" <photoforum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Date: Wednesday, April 30, 2008, 12:34 PM > On Mon, April 28, 2008 00:34, Trevor Cunningham wrote: > > Here in lies a reason to prefer film over digital. > Magnetic storage is > > far more unstable than sleeves and notebooks. Burned > storage has a > > suprisingly limited shelf life, so we are learning. > You can still play > > your cd's from the early 1980's, but the > commerically produced materials > > are much higher quality than anything you can to make > yourself. > > Indeed, digital is less expensive...but, then again, > it's cheaper > > Let's see; the first counter-case that comes to mind is > the photographer > who died in the WTC attack. The film in his film camera > was > unrecoverable, but all the images on the flash memory card > were recovered. > > There were also a collection of important negatives of the > Kennedy family > in a safe-deposit vault under the building; you may have > seen the book, > made from prints and contact sheets sitting around that > photographer's > studio. If the data had been digital, there could have > been more than one > copy, and it likely would have survived. > > Film in sleeves and notebooks is degrading every single > second it exists; > most especially color film. I've got works I shot > myself with notable > color shifts and density loss. > > You have to go to controlled-humidity low-temperature > storage to come > anywhere close to stopping film degradation. Mind you, > that can be as > simple as a refrigerator and zip-lock bags, perhaps with > silica dessicants > in them (I haven't tried to do this and haven't > researched current > thoughts on best storage conditions). It also makes access > slow and > somewhat painful, and risky (open the bag before it's > warmed up and water > will condense all over your valuable negatives). > > I've been using Kodak Gold Ultima CD-Rs, and more > recently MAM gold > archival DVDs. So far no disk I've tested has shown > any significant > increase in error rates. Counting Kodak Photo CDs I got > made, I have > examples going back to around 1994 that I keep checking up > on. (The data > is also on multiple hard drives, and on more recent archive > disks I > burned, but I like to check up on the older samples just > for curiosity.) > These disks claim lives in the 200 year range -- obviously > based on > accelerated testing rather than natural aging. In *that* > timespan, I > don't expect DVD readers to be available any more, and > I think file format > changes are pretty likely too. > > Digital archives work wonderfully *when competently > managed*. They are > *horrible* for long-term benign neglect. The ability to > store multiple > copies in separate locations gives you the ability to > protect against > problems that are intractable in analog (where copies are > not only > expensive but *inferior*). > > Analog media degrades constantly over time, but sometimes > fairly slowly. > The right analog media do pretty well with long-term benign > neglect. > > So what I see here is that they have different > characteristics, and so one > is better for some things, the other is better for others. > > -- > David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ > Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ > Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ > Dragaera: http://dragaera.info Well you are also comparing the apples of digital to the oranges, pears and bananas of film. With a managed archive, I am not going to disagree with you to a point, but cost certainly plays a part of this picture. First prints color prints do age and the more light exposure the worse it is, but there is a counter point here too. The papers we see now so aged and faded were much earlier formulations and technologies that have drastically improved. Early digital prints were about 6 months instead of the years of the early color prints. Negatives were far less prone to fading because they were usually stored in the dark. The early E6 slide films were also prone to fading, but the old K14 Kodachomes are about as light fast as you can get if you keep them in the dark. Kodachrome was developed in the late 30s as an adaptation of movie films and we have a long history of just how stable it can be. Big difference. We know for the most part not estimate. Even the modern E6 is much better with stability and its much more tolerant of projection. Add to the mix black and white film. Negatives are very very stable if processed correctly and I guess with the right connections you could still print from the plates of Matthew Brady images taken from the US Civil War. Prints on fiber base paper and the image will last as long as the paper and even RC papers are getting much much better. Now how things handle excessive abuse really can not come into play. Fires and floods happen and fact of life is that somethings you just can't prevent or control. What good does it do to have two copies of an archive that can not be read by any computer currently in existence. You have 2 copies of worthless junk instead of one. Though you may lose a negative, a digital alternative is always available as long as a print survives and even better if a digital scan is made of the negative, but then you have 2 archives. Just not as simple as most think. There really isn't in my opinion a right or wrong answer with some of the questions and possibilities. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ
