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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.
It's seems like the majority of her argument lies on the lack of storage space on memory cards. Two easy solutions:
1) Get bigger memory cards. You can't take as many pictures on a 12 exposure roll as you can on a 36. Common sense.
2) Get more cards. Your photographer won't get enough shots if he only brought one roll of film, so why are you sending him out with one memory card.
Both these problems exist in traditional photography, just in slightly different forms.
Regardless, memory cards are getting bigger and cheaper. This is only a problem in the short term.
on your CDs. Unless you splurge for the $1.00 CDR silver or gold ones made with the special dyes- those cheap ones you get at compusa at 100 for 20$ won't last 5 years...
....
And that assumes you don't ever play them or leave them in the light or expose them to exessive heat or excessive humidity and actually remember to back them up and
[images disappear from the web, CD-R gets scratched, CD-R gets melted]
What is the digital equivalent to printing a photograph on acid-free paper, stored behind UV-filter glass, in a climate-controlled area?
If you put that acid-free paper in some sketchy self-storage warehouse with no fire protection, it might go up in smoke. If you leave that acid-free photo on your desk to get scratched up and bleached by the sun, it's not going to look so hot either. Perhaps if you treat your digital photographs with the same respect you are giving this imaginary silver-halide photograph, you will find that they won't get wrecked so easily.
In a slightly-less-snippy reply to your question (I'm tired), try keeping the master CD in a climate-controlled area out of the sun, and leaving a copy of it on your desk to get scratched up (I've been doing this with software for years -- that whole fair-use thing). You could keep the master in a fire safe along with your other backup media (you do make backups, right?). You could even, as I have done with my data, work out a backup exchange with a friend that you see regularly, so that a copy will be offsite, just in case of fire, flood, or the Feds. And, of course, transfer that stuff on media that's a few years old to fresh media that is now shockingly less expensive than it was when you recorded the data originally.
Taking care of your data is not hard, is not particularly expensive, and can give you great piece of mind. Backups, onsite and offsite, can be handy in a pinch, and are like an insurance policy, without the getting-ripped-off-by-actuaries part (forgive me, Husker). You don't have to go overboard -- just do a little planning ahead and treat your data with respect. Good luck!
Bleah. "Plain old text" doesn't work that well for links.
_ 10_18_gear.html _ 10_29_eco_gallery.html
http://www.robgalbraith.com/diginews/2001-10/2001
and
http://www.robgalbraith.com/diginews/2001-10/2001
0x0D 0x0A
The long-term issue caused by the movement to digital cameras by the journalism world (especially fast turnaround publications like daily newspapers) is not storage or archiving. These are inconveniences that will be settled with the advancement of technology and time. While CaseyB might be able to get a few more images on his consumer digital than a professional journalist using a Nikon D1H, I agree that these are not the important issues.
The real change that digital cameras have brought to journalism has nothing to do with what's inside the camera, but what's on the outside: the preview window. Before digital cameras (and scanners in the situation of photographers that processed film on-site and then transmitted), most photojournalists didn't see the results of their shooting until it appeared in the paper the next day. Because his images were being recorded into a 'black box' the photographer was always forward thinking - trying to get the best image from the subject in front of him. Giving the photographer the power to see what they had just produced suddenly put the photographer in the editing chair, and gave him the power to judge whether an image was newsworthy. With a push of the 'trash can' button, the image was lost forever.
Shooting and editing are fundamentally different challenges. I've been in both shoes before and they require very different skill sets and motivations. Editors are responsible for representing the intent of the story, as well as trying to find the best image. Because these tasks aren't mutually exclusive, an image that the photographer might have considered unusable (because it was slightly out of focus, poorly composed, underexposed, etc.), could be the perfect choice if it does a good job of 'telling the story' despite its flaws. So, while it is true that 'infinite' storage in the future will elimintate the need for the photographer to delete any images, it won't get rid of the photographer's new role as pre-editor.
Probably my favorite example of a situation where shooting on film created an unexpected timeless image was shot by Dirck Halstead, a veteran Time photographer. He shot the famous Monica Lewinsky hugging Bill Clinton photograph. At the time he shot the image, Monica was an unknown intern that happened to receive a warm hug from Bill at an event on the White House lawn. There were a lot of photographers present, but Dirck was one of the only ones shooting film. When the scandal broke a few months later, Dirck had the feeling that he had seen her face before, so Time hired a researcher to dig in his archives and find the image. The image was found, and Dirck was the only one that got the shot despite their being many other photographers there -- other photographers, all shooting digital. Many of them probably shot that image, but who would save an image of the President hugging an unknown person?
When I was a newspaper photograper, which admittedly was 20 years ago, we bought film in bulk (like 100' lengths) and we rolled our own canisters.
The paper liked it because it was cheaper, we liked it because we could make 50-shot rolls so we had less down time changing rolls. Particularly important when shooting something like sports where you can miss the 'big play' in an instant (and my Nikon autowinder can blast through a whole roll faster than you can say "Jordan's playing for who?").
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
Yes, digital media is volatile, but arguably much less so then chemical/photoreactive media.
The amount of money you spend to keep those precious images safe depends on how important it is to you to do so. For every day use there is nothing wrong with CD-Rs, just keep them out of the sun and don't set your ashtray and/or vodka-tonic on it. If you feel that you need better, look into better CD-Rs suck as the Kodak Ultima 80s. Keep them in a nice safe shoebox on the top shelf of the hall closet (in their cases, damnit) like you probably do those precious historical shots of you riding a Big Wheel in your diapers.
If you are really proud of your work or you make some money with that camera, well then invest in a quality hard drive, format it and only keep data on it. The odds of it frying are poor (insert your IBM deskstar joke here) but if you must get a couple and raid them for redundancy... that should buy you a couple of years before something as stable as magneto-optical comes back and more useful... Also, there is no shame in printing your best work (on the proper acid free photo paper with lasting dyes) and keeping them somewhere safe as well, you can always scan them back in if you need them binary. If you are really really good and take actually historical shots, then pretty much the Internet is your storage device, since there are usually at least hundreds of major university servers worldwide holding untold thousands of versions of most of the most historical of images.
As for compact or smart media, my Olympus E-10 takes both and can use microdrives as well. This pretty much allows me to take as many damn photos as I want (badly, usually) before I have to swap out either for an empty chip or card. Since the argument is about digital publishing there is no need into getting into the whole mess about huge tif files Vs small lo-res jpgs but with a couple of one gig microdrives (and maybe a laptop or digital wallet to dump the data into) all your whining is hollow.
(Speaking of which, Happy Halloween. Don't eat popcorn balls, they are nasty. Also: candy-f**king-corn)
The real argument is pretty much, if you are a real artist, the price of a digital that can come close to a quality (read professional) 35mm and the equipment it takes to process the data to the degree a pro can manipulate negs in a darkroom is still waaaaay too expensive. But not for long. I wish I could whine along with the "technology is bad for us" crowd, but not this time.
First off, if you do professional photography, you don't use 35mm
Virtually all photojournalism that isn't shot digitally is shot on 35 mm film. Next time you watch a sporting event or news conference, take a look at what the photographers are using. You won't see Hasselblads and Toyos. Not that they don't have their place, too, but you're much more likely to find them in a studio than at the frontlines in Afghanistan or at a Formula 1 race. And National Geographic's photography FAQ says
I do agree that printing is a creative process, though it can also be true in the digital domain. Digital printing is different, though, in that once you get it "right", you can crank out print after print with identical dodging and burning, etc.
I work in the media world and this is what actually happens...
:-)
EVERY shot unless it is blurred or horribly under or over exposed is kept on record. Every digital tape we shoot with our digital betacam cameras is stored and kept with no death date. I have a room full of 3/4" video tapes that has footage from 1980's and we have another storage facility with 1" video reels from the 70's. Today? we store digitally on DVD's and last year fits in a drawer (and has 3 times the amount of video shot.)
Why? because that is the way it is done.. and my fun is writing software to keep track of it all
The problem lies with the fact that we cannot read the 1" video reels anymore. we do have 1 or 2 3/4 decks around but who knows where they are in 30 years. what about in 700 years? who will be able to read the video from the DVD's? Format change is the only threat to information, printouts or actual paper photos can be viewed in 30,000 years while the DVD will require the archeologist to build a dvd reader to gain access to the contents.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
How many film cameras these days still work if they run out of power?
More than you think. Most of the pros I know have manual cameras as backup precisely because of the battery problem. That's also why I hang on to my old manual stuff -- nearly infallible backup.
Actually, now that I think about it, I only have one camera that dies when the battery goes flat...
mjs
A very famous point about this was the man who discovered he had a (film) copy of a photo of Bill Clinton hugging Monica Lewinsky. There were dozens of other (professional) photographers there shooting pictures. All the rest had digital cameras and apparently discarded the unimportant pictures. His apparently was the only one left because he had it on film, which apparently makes it less likely one will discard it. As a result he still had the image when it became important. Nobody else did.
Professionals in an industry often don't want to take the time to learn about ancilliary effects, e.g. they just want to take pictures, they don't want to take the time to learn new ways to use what they have. That's why it took architects thousands of years to learn that you could build things which were lighter and stronger with steel instead of stone, but you have to use different methods than copying stone structures. Perhaps that is the case.Paul Robinson <Postmaster@paul.washington.dc.us>
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.