David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
Chris Telesca - TelephotoNC wrote:
I think this is a big issue.
I haven't bought into digital because it's not cost-effective for me
to spend 8 grand on a camera body that can shoot the same resolution
imagery that I can shoot with a 20 year old Nikon. And to have two
of them (one for backup) makes even less sense when they will be
obsolete in 3 years.
Measuring resolution is an interesting process. I can make bigger
prints from 6MP DSLR raw files than I ever managed chemically from
35mm film (I mean that look satisfactory to me, of course). But I
can also make bigger prints from scanned film than I ever could in
the darkroom, too. For me, grain always limited enlargement, and
that's no longer the problem for landscape and scenic pictures
(sometimes noise does play the same limiting role in available light
photos).
And I have never spent much over 1/4 of $8000 on a digital camera
body. If you're going for the *top* end -- then shouldn't you be
talking about more like $50,000?
No - 35MM equivalent - Canon 1DsMkIII - $8,000 - 21 megapixels.
And why are you making such big prints from 6MP DSLR raw files? What
are they being used for, and what is the proper viewing distance for
those prints? Do you have a mural size printer for your digital
imagery? I have printed up to 20x24 in a darkroom - are you printing
bigger than that on your own?
Why would grain limit enlargement size but not the resolution of your
sensor? If you are doing something in Photoshop to minimize the grain
in your digital imagery, then obviously you are doing something that
you can't do with film.
No - when I graduated from RIT in 1984, I had different film format
cameras (Nikon 35MM, Hasselblad 6x6, and Sinar 4x5) and I added some
Speedotron lighting gear. I think by 1986 I had about 10 to 12 grand
in gear that has worked well for me over the years.
"Obsolete" is an interesting concept. Seems to me that if they're
good now, they're good in three years. Possibly something *better*
will be available, and some people will deride your gear as obsolete
-- but if the way the new gear is better doesn't matter to you, you
should just ignore them! And remember that my $2300 Fuji S2 (late
2002) came with a "lifetime supply" of free film and processing. I
think the money I saved on film and lab fees alone paid for that
camera before I sold it off. And I've made and exhibited a lot more
prints since going digital than I did when I had a darkroom.
No - obsolete in that editors and stock houses want files of a certain
resolution, which increases over the years. If a stock house kept the
same requirements they had year ago when the first Nikon D1 came out,
they would get bombarded bombarded with tons of submissions from guys
with point and shoot digital cameras that have higher resolution than
the D1 had when it came out.
I have every negative I have ever shot going back to when I was 14
years old. Granted some of that stuff isn't worth printing, but I
also have negatives that are over 60 years old that I can do
everything from print to scan. Try doing that with digital imagery
that is stored on a medium that might not work in a year or more, or
when it craps out you have nothing to fall back on.
I have slides that I shot myself that have faded significantly,
though using digital technology I can recover much of the color. I
have color prints other people gave the family long ago that are
faded past the point that I can restore the colors (I can still get a
poor B&W image from them). It would last much better, of course, if
I stored it in controlled-humidity cold storage. But I'll bet you're
not storing yours that way either.
Actually - close to it. At or below 70 degrees with controlled
humidity, dark storage, archival pages. And of course you can use
digital technology to improve
(The oldest of my own negatives I'm sure I can still lay hands on
date to 1962; I have access to considerably older photos in my
mother's collection.)
You're certainly right that a digital archive must be intelligently
and diligently managed to stay safe. If left untended for a long
time, it's likely to disappear, through media degradation or format
changes (the format changes don't really make it quite disappear,
they just increase the cost of getting it back into modern formats).
However, if diligently tended, a digital archive can be *eternal*;
something there was never any hope of for film images (other than by
scanning to digital form).
That's just it - how often do you have to tend it and spend money
updating your digital archive? With film, it's just there.
I think my digital photos are much safer, during my lifetime, than my
film photos are. I can manage an archive of this size myself, and
the timespan isn't that big a challenge to the media.
I disagree.
And if my house burns down, or is flooded, or carried off to Oz by a
tornado, or whatever, I won't lose my digital photos. I'll lose all
my film photos except the ones I have scans of. (I really do have
off-site backups of my digital photos; up through about a month ago
currently, but I'm likely to get that updated this weekend).
Fire proof safe.
Look, if you're happier shooting film, and like the results better,
more power to you. Keep doing it that way! But try to keep your
claims about digital toned down to the actual truth. (Also your
claims about film.) There's plenty of stuff where the exact lines
are fuzzy; we can argue about those to our heart's content :-).
My claims are the truth about film and digital - from my perspective
If digital works for you - more power to you. But when you say that I
need to keep my claims toned down to the actual truth, then admit that
some lines are fuzzy, you are not making a good case that my opinions
about film are less truthful than yours.
I know that my cost to start processing and printing B&W film and
prints was a lot less than having to do digital. Think about it - you
need a digital camera, a computer and a printer. You are talking
about thousands of dollars right there. Then you have your paper and
inks.
Have you shot with a DSLR yourself? Or seen work by good
photographers using that kind of equipment? It rather sounds like you
don't have much idea of the capabilities of current equipment.
No - I do have friends who have pro DSLR equipment and I know how
their gear compares to what I shot with now. It's simply not worth
spending that kind of green for equipment that shoots the same
resolution as film when I already have film gear that works fine.
I have pics of my grandparents and great grandparents that I can
reprint if need be, or scan if I want to. If I had to shoot these
pics on digital, I'd have to transfer over from one generation of
storage to another every couple of years - and add to it all the new
stuff I shoot.
I've been shooting a lot of digital since 2000. I have *not once*
had to transfer over storage media during those 8 years. I can buy
brand-new drives in ordinary consumer stores to read all of it that's
on removable media, if necessary.
I started having some of my film scanned in about 1993, I think. I
have *not once* had to transfer over storage media during those 15
years. The original media are readable (as of a month ago, when I
last tried), plus they're on my file server (mirrored), two backup
disk drives, on-site optical disks, and off-site optical disks. The
original media for these are CDs; they can be read in all current
computers, and I can even write new CDs, it's by no means an obsolete
medium yet.
I absolutely agree that a long-term digital archive will need to deal
with this issue; that plus the life-span of the media are the reason
that a digital archive must be diligently managed. It does not do at
all well on benign neglect, and that has consequences for historians
and archivists and future archaeologists; definitely.
But "every couple of years" is a gross exaggeration.
Properly processed and stored silver-based imagery will last longer
than CDs and DVDs.
Are you storing yours properly? Low temperature and controlled
humidity, etc.? How much does it cost to store a significant
collection that way? And by silver-based you mean B&W, right? So,
short of RGB separations, no color photography in the collection?
No - silver-based means color. Color negative film, color slide film
and color prints - they all use silver.
Even with that -- we don't know which will last longer. But I think
it's very likely that top-grade CD blanks written in a good drive
will out-last chromogenic color materials stored at room
temperature. I wouldn't be certain that they wouldn't out-last
silver-gelatine materials, but over *that* timespan changes in media
standards are nearly certain to be an issue as well. But the
lifespan of one copy of the data on a CD doesn't matter that much; a
digital archive isn't dependent for its integrity on one piece of media.
Show me the tests. And then show me a computer that uses a floppy
disk that you can buy today.
Of course, in 200 years, say, you may very well not be able to find
an enlarger, or printing paper, or even a film scanner. Presumably
somebody could build or adapt something to do that job for you, since
of course high-resolution imaging of small areas will continue to be
important for science and probably art as well; but there may well
not be any off-the-shelf way to make prints from your B&W negatives
in 200 years.
And there may not be any way to take the digital imagery you have on
your discs and turn them into prints. You might not be able to find
cables or adapters.
But if they have a scanner, I would be able to load up my film and do
something with it. You might not be able to take digital imagery off
your discs and do anything with it if your discs can't communicate
with the computers of tomorrow.
Chris Telesca
