Do Digital Photos Endanger History?

Ant writes "Experienced photographer Jayne West wrote her degree dissertation on the historical impact of digital capture. She argues that the use of digital photography in news reporting means we could lose a valuable pictorial record of history." Much of her argument seems weak to me (precisely because digital photography allows the instant culling West talks about). The digital storage itself, though, perhaps ought to make us nervous.

Comments

Re:Senseless

[hubbabubba]

Obviously you're not a photographer. There is a vast difference between digital and film, and not just in the fact that with the former you end up with pixels, where the latter gives you a physical product that exceeds the quality of a digital image in every respect. Digital imaging will catch up to film someday, but it ain't there yet!

As to your consumer grade camera storing 1000+ "medium-res" images, those may be suitable for publication on the web, but certainly not in a newspaper or magazine, where 300 dpi is the minimum needed to print a typical 150 line screen. Unless your camera stores, oh, about 1GB or better, which, sorry to say, ain't consumer grade, you're just talking out your uninformed arse.

As for traditional photographic skills being "antiquated" in light of new technology, you couldn't be more wrong. All the skills involved in photography are completely transferable to digital. If you don't have any chops as a film-based photographer, you're not going to be even slightly better using the latest and greatest digital whiz-bang camera. Photography's not about technology, it's about vision, about understanding the interplay of light and shadow, about having an intuitive feel for composition and an instinct for capturing the right moment. You remind me of people who learn how to use Front Page and then call themselves a web developer. Get a clue, dude, cuz there's certainly none evident in your post.