Re: Everybody Is A Photographer

[Philip Wayner <pwayner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Digital images will only last as long as they are “saved” to the latest 
means of archiving and if there is a method of reclaiming the image in 
the future..  Any break in the storage method history and the image is lost.

Think of the ways that images have been stored to date, from the 
original five inch floppy to the hard floppy, Zip disks, tape drives, 
early removable drives, external drives, hard drives, and jump drives, 
CDs and DVDs.   The problem will not be the images but rather the 
problem of how to get them if the means of extracting them is not 
available.
Imagine if your work were stored on a CD and in thirty years from now 
one of your children wanted a family image on it, if there were no means 
of reading the disk the image is lost.

I recently printed a sixty year old negative.  Enlargers are becoming 
rarer, but even if they are not manufactured any longer it does not take 
a graduate engineer to construct an enlarger as many older members have 
probably done in their early years.  The image could still be used.

I use digital and Photoshop and enjoy working with them, but I never 
have the feeling that the Image is safe or sometimes even available.

Philip Wayner