Chris Telesca - TelephotoNC wrote:
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.
Which is nowhere near the high end of digital quality or file size,
which was my point. And you mention a large-format enlarger, so you're
not limiting yourself to 35mm on the film size it doesn't seem like.
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?
1. Because it's what I had.
2. They're framed on the wall in my home. You can easily view them
from about 18 inches, though most people choose to view them from
further off. It's a winter snow scene with lots of bare tree branches
at various distances, so it's kind of a worst-case for being able to see
resolution problems really (or "best" case; I mean it gives the problems
excellent opportunities to manifest).
3. Nope, but I had a chance to play with a friend's, and it was a blast.
4. Nope. I've only printed up to 16x20 in a darkroom, and that not in
30 years; I gave up on taking 35mm up that big, but even 6mp digital
looks excellent at that size. Not as good as a good 4x5 negative would,
I don't think, mind you.
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.
I didn't say the sensor resolution *doesn't* limit it; but in my
experience grain limited film enlargeability to much smaller sizes than
available resolution appears to limit digital enlargeability. So grain
always *used to* be my limit, and now I'm having to rethink how big
things can go.
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.
I considered going to RIT; would have been in 1972. Ended up elsewhere
(and as a math major, with photography as a hobby, which has probably
been a better choice for me I think).
"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.
Ah, I've heard people make that complaint about stock houses, in
particular. That won't last I don't t hink; they're already demanding
far less than the highest digital resolution available.
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 recommendations I've seen are talking about below 32F for long-term
storage (but it's more of an issue with color of course).
(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.
Not often enough to be an issue. I've done one re-burn of the older
disks, not because anything showed I "had to" but because I'm paranoid
(and to save space in the off-site location). In return, I get the
ability to have off-site backup, which is a *huge* benefit.
You do know the story of the Jacques Lowe pictures of the Kennedy
family, don't you?
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.
That's the cool thing about people being different, we get to have more
interesting discussions.
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.
Do you have one? Is it media-rated? Do you know how your negatives will
react to being exposed to temperatures up to 125F with high humidity?
And Jacques Lowe's negatives were in a fire-proof vault, and they got
destroyed anyway. Multiple locations is much MUCH safer.
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.
The specific claim that one needed to recopy digital media every couple
of years because the technology changes was wrong, as I demonstrated
from my own history (15 years since my first digital copy of photos was
burned, and the original media is something I can buy blanks of and buy
drives for in any computer store today). While in some dialects a
"couple" doesn't have to mean exactly two, 15 (and counting) cannot
reasonably be described that way.
Lots of other things are more fruitful to discuss.
For most kids today, the computer comes free, probably as a cast-off
from their parents. By the time they go to college they'll certainly
have their own. Finding a room in your parents' house you can build a
darkroom into is a much bigger challenge most places. By the time
you're getting semi-pro level serious you may well need to enhance the
computer, but again it's tremendously cheap compared to building a new
darkroom. Of course if you happen to have the spare room with water (or
are willing to work dry, with a sink somewhere else, as I did in my
first darkroom) then you don't need to think of the cost of the space.
Printing top-quality digital prints is more expensive than materials for
RA-4 darkroom printing, but on the other hand you don't need to make
hardcopy to see how the photo looks as much as you did with film
(especially color negs, where almost nobody can judge color accurately
from the negative).
I was interested in photography at least from age 8 (I've got the
negatives to prove it), but until I got serious enough to build a
darkroom and learn how to do my own developing and printing, I was
severely constrained by not being able to afford film and processing.
With digital, which lots of kids can reach by old equipment handed down
from their parents (same place my first 35mm camera came from), that
won't be a constraint. I think that alone gives rise to tremendously
exciting possibilities.
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 certainly wouldn't expect you to buy it and pay the high prices it
commands when you don't want to use it, but I was wondering if you'd
*tried out* other people's equipment (like I spent a week shooting with
a friend's Canon 5D while he used my Nikon D200, on a visit a couple of
years back). And you answered that question too I think.
I do get much MUCH better high-ISO capability from digital than I ever
did from film, and that's been an important part of my photography from
when I first went into the darkroom; I used Acufine a lot, and even a
certain amount of straight HC110 replenisher for extreme pushes.
And even with just my D200 I can do some better things with high-speed
sequences. It won't shoot as long a sequence as a film camera (setting
aside film cameras with a 250-exposure backs, which I never had, and
which I was never equipped to process), but I can shoot many more
sequences before I go bankrupt, and the ability to see what I got
immediately can guide the framing and timing of the next attempt. Plus
if you need high-speed sequence shooting you're inherently depending on
some luck, and seeing if your luck was in helps a whole lot.
You're quite right that it's now much more expensive to have a spare
body, and that's certainly a concern. I haven't had only one body for
my lens system previously since, oh, about 1983 I think. If I were
making my living with my camera I'd certainly have to have another one
(I would probably have kept my Fuji S2 instead of selling it, which
would have cost me $640, that being what I sold it for). On the other
hand I've heard former film photographers reporting they spent around
$20,000 *per year* on film and lab fees that digital completely
replaced; how that goes will depend of course on exactly what kind of
photography you do, and obviously it's the higher volumes that will pay
off digital equipment more quickly.
No - silver-based means color. Color negative film, color slide film
and color prints - they all use silver.
Yes, I know they do. Most people emphasizing "silver" do seem to be
talking about B&W (because the image they work with is directly made of
silver), and "silver-gelatine" is one of the museum description for
conventional B&W materials. And I was thinking your claims about
durability of the media were more in line with that than with
chromogenic materials. So I asked, thanks for clarifying.
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.
All three of the computers on the shelf over my head have floppy drives
in them. When I was getting a quote for a new one last weekend I was
asked if I wanted a floppy drive in it (I didn't; but I was asked, so
they must still find people wanting them). You can buy USB floppy
drives that will connect to any modern computer. And you can buy the
disks in any computer store still. Floppy disks are very clearly on the
down-side of their curve, but they're still quite easy to get data off
of. (The older 5.25" ones are past that. If the old drives I have in
boxes didn't work I'd have to try to find a used one, or use a
commercial data recovery service, they're not available new at least in
ordinary computer stores. But being coated magnetic media, any 5.25"
disks I have would be pretty likely to be unreadable anyway by now,
they're pretty old. I have agreed with you from the beginning that a
digital archive requires ongoing attention, and will collapse
disastrously if neglected for extended periods. But the media
transitions aren't that frequent, and they aren't sudden; there's lots
of warning.)
I can find you articles claiming lifespans for CD-Rs ranging from 2 to
300+ years :-). Since *none* of the ones I have burned have died yet,
the low end of that range is pretty clearly FUD (and it looks like it
was coming from magnetic tape manufacturers). For my archival copies I
was using Kodak Gold Ultima CD-Rs, and for the newer DVDs I'm using the
MAM gold archival blanks -- these should be among the best available,
which makes a huge difference in how they last. The wikipedia article
says "With proper care it is thought that CD-Rs should be readable one
thousand times or more and have a shelf life of several hundred years"
and then goes on to discuss the various ways you can shorten it.
I think CD-Rs probably have a long enough shelf life that drive
availability would be an issue before the disk degraded.
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.
And that would be a big worry if I were planning to just let them sit,
ignored, into the future. It *is* something of a worry for historians
and archaeologists. It's not a worry for me because 1) I have no
reasonable personal concern for anything more than 50 years from now
(I'm 53 now, and nobody in my recent ancestry has lived to 100), and 2)
I'm paying attention to computer media, and will be dumping the hard
drives to Blue-Ray disks one of these days, and quite possibly to other
successor media after that.
I've agreed from the start that a digital archive perishes relatively
quickly from even "benign" neglect.
I don't think it's a reasonable risk that software won't understand JPEG
or TIFF format, or that color printers won't be available, within the
timespan I care about (or 10 times that timespan). Cables aren't an
issue because, as I keep repeating, I'm not depending on my archive
surviving by just sitting there on the current media.
--
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
