On Thu, September 4, 2008 09:07, Emily L. Ferguson wrote: > At 8:50 AM -0500 9/4/08, David Dyer-Bennet wrote: >>On Thu, September 4, 2008 06:44, Chris wrote: >>> Yes specialists are usually better and cheaper than doing it yourself. >> >>I don't expect better at that price-point. You won't be getting drum >>scans. For that matter, I don't expect an expert operator, or even >>somebody who looks at the results. I expect a stack-fed scanner >> operating >>on automatic. >> >>Which still might be an appropriate choice for the first pass. > > Sure, but what's wrong with a light table for the first pass? Surely > most of us can read a b&w neg on a light table with a loupe and > determine which images are actually worth storing digitally forever. I've still got the books of contact sheets for my B&W neg collection on the shelf, and I look for things in them. But even after selection, there's still a "first pass" and later work. > This push to have everything digitized still doesn't make sense to > me. Everything is not worth keeping in the world, and that includes > strips of film, despite how economically they can be stored. My experience is that I've continued to find images in 30-year-old contact sheets that haven't previously been printed that I now want to print. Or that I now *can* print; the technology has improved and my skills have improved. So if I'm making a one-time-only push, I tend to want to digitize everything within reach. If the materials are stable and belong to me, I can be more relaxed about it. > My standards for the condition of my final digitized images are very > high. They must be defect free - no dust, no scratches, no water > spots - or why bother? The files must be printable up to 12x18 at > least. And they must have significant content - it may be love, it > may be compositional perfection, it may be a once-in-a-lifetime > memory - but they must have significant content. If one is thinking in terms of historical record rather than art, one ends up with considerably lower technical standards, in my experience. And I'm mostly interested in that aspect of my older negatives (I mostly recognized the artistically "important" (to me) ones early). > Once you sort through all that film or digital data and apply some > standards to the pile, just how many images rise to the top? Standards include "contains uncle Fred that I don't have many pictures of". Depending on the trip, that could bring the number up pretty fast. > Surely not 1000 from a brief trip. Maybe 125, maybe a couple hundred > on the outside, if you're a professional photographer, but a > thousand? $350 for so many images that cost less than $10 or so to > store in plastic pages than to clean up, contrast correct, dodge and > burn, crop and level, sharpen, keyword, caption, date, store and > backup? Sometimes one pays for convenience. Our time is limited, as I'm sure you've noticed yourself. (In fact one thing you're looking to do here, I think, is cut down the pile of images to work with.) > And are you then going to discard the originals? Depending on the medium, one might not count on it being usable in another 20 years. And one might not own it. (The specific case I believe was B&W negs, pretty stable, that he does own, so in that case, makes sense to plan in terms of ongoing access to the originals.) Although you can preserve digital images against a lot of situations that will destroy film originals: like a house fire. A copy of the backups at work, at a friend's house, whatever, will do it. > As David says: > >>What >>percentage of photos in the stack are likely to be of serious interest? > > It seems to me that one begins there. Always. I don't always get the same answer you do, it sounds like, but that's definitely the place to begin, and I won't assume other people get the same answers I do to the question. -- 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
