On Thu, June 25, 2009 16:17, steve harris wrote: > You concluded that I'm "a bit of an anti-digital zealot". > > That is not strictly true. In fact, my problem may have been that of an > early digital adopter. That can certainly warp ones viewpoint, yes! I picked up an Epson 850Z in the spring of 2000, myself, and found myself doing the vast majority of my photography with this 2MP P&S (though it did have a decent lens, and unusually fast). > I started with a Canon G1 in 2001, progressed to a Fuji S2, later a Leica > DMR, and then reverted to film capture for a number of reasons. One being > that I was uncomfortable with the camera life cycles and cost. Canon is > now on a G10, averaging about 1 new version every year. And I'm on my second DSLR since the Fuji S2 myself (a D200 and now a D700); definitely far faster than I ever replaced or upgraded film gear, I agree. Still, the lab and film costs for shooting in the quantities I've been shooting would have been far higher. And for a professional, often spectacularly higher; I've heard people talk casually about $18,000/year lab bills. (Apparently clients often want all the savings from no lab charges for themselves, and some pros are getting pinched by that; but as an amateur and only occasional semi-pro, I mostly couldn't bill the lab fees to customers anyway.) > I continue to > shoot digital in the studio. I shoot film on the street. I think that we > may indeed see the end of almost all film within the next few years. > Maybe I just want to shoot it while I still can. I have no quarrel with people who want to shoot film because they're used to it, or because they can get some particular effect that's harder in digital, or whatever actual sane reason. Including "I like the look better but I can't explain why", really :-). I've heard enough claims that seem to me loony (and remember, I'm perfectly happy to accept "I like it better but can't explain why"; you have to be far past that to be "loony" in my book) that perhaps I'm a bit quick on the trigger in this area. But I don't like people spreading disinformation and crazy ideas much. Or with people a bit nostalgic about things, either; I'm plenty old enough to appreciate that. I'm a bit nostalgic about the Leica M3 myself. > I started to think about this longevity issue when I digitized some 200 or > so negatives my Grandfather shot in the 1920's. The recent announcement > of Kodak about Kodachrome revived my thinking about it. I started doing digital printing in the early dye inkjet era, and then was running MIS pigment inks in an Epson 1200, so I was worried about the permanence of prints from digital pretty much from the beginning (and was worried about permanence of my silver gelatine prints while in higshcool, let's say 1970). Computers are my profession, so the issues of disk reliability and data loss and backups and so forth are very familiar. But photography in digital form brought me to considerations of longer term storage than I'd mostly worried about before (for business data). Also I've been around enough to see media nearly disappear -- punch cards, paper tape, now floppy disks, for example. Especially for photos from the 60s and 70s, I'm thinking that digitizing them is an urgent step in having any hope of preserving them. (Not so much B&W; but the ordinary family pictures on chromogenic color materials. Lots of them are badly faded already if they've been at all unlucky in storage.) > I appreciate your thoughtful answer to my queries. Thanks. There certainly ARE issues all around the question of archiving photos, in any format, and it's good to discuss them with other people who care, because I learn things. If somebody wanted to make really sure that five photos survived for the next 10 years, I could give fairly specific advice that I think would do the job (most likely massive overkill); but anything more complex, especially more long-term, than that, there's endless room for debate and doubt. -- 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
