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

Flawed arguments

[Quasar1999]

But, because of storage issues on the camera, he will have to delete some of those images as he goes along.

Umm, what if you run out of film using a conventional camera... same diff...

Re:Flawed arguments

[DennyK]

Nope, not the same at all. If you run out of film, you cannot reuse the same film that you've already used, so you pull it out, put it aside, and slap in a new roll. With a digital camera, however, photographers may simply delete unwanted shots to free up space for new ones. In the first instance, all the photos are kept indefinatly. In the second, the deleted ones are lost forever.

DennyK

Re:Flawed arguments

[hey!]

Well sort of. But the difference is that when you run out of film, the pictures you got vs. did not get don't reflect an editorial viewpoint. When you got through your shots to discard the ones you don't want to make room, you are using an editorial viewpoint.

Suppose you go to a Palestinian demonstration after September 11 to get pictures of youths firing Kalashnikovs in celebration. You run out of memory so you discard a few uninteresting shots to make sure you get a good one of that kid firing his weapon in the air. Well, guess what, an experienced editor might have decided that shot of the kid's friends looking on in their Nike swoosh and Chicago Bulls T-shirts might have told an interesting counterbalancing story.

The answer, of course, is to carry lots of memory with you.

Real issue: This woman needs more storage.

[BierGuzzl]

With the proper amount of data storage, there would be no need to do "on site editing" and with proper data transmission capabilities, the collected pictures could be sent to home base in an endless stream to a massive data storage server where they could be archived forever.

My major issue with digital photography is that it can be copied without degradation. However, as long as photographers stenographically sign their pictures, it'll be easy to tell if the exact copy of that picture was used. On the other hand, an altered copy might prove more difficult to track down without tenacious visual inspection

Re:Real issue: This woman needs more storage.

[david duncan scott]

Did you read as as far as, say, the third paragraph:

With digital image capture, the most pressing issue is that we are losing the past. We lose the sequence of images that captures the events leading up to whatever image is chosen for publication.

No, she's not talking about the manipulation of the image, she's talking about the destruction of unused images.

But, because of storage issues on the camera, he will have to delete some of those images as he goes along.

I'm not quite sure what she coulde have written to make her point more clear. Perhaps colorful talking animals could have explained it to you better?

No point in relating my ideas here.

[SevenTowers]

If you look on the same page, after the article, the readers of that site have already raised all the valid points in defense of the technology. There is no point in repeating what was said but here is a summary of the most important points in my view:
-Digital media is evolving so that storage capacity soon becomes obsolete
- Film is harder and more expensive to backup that digital media.
-You can take a lot more pictures without having to change memory cards that with conventional film (considering the standard is about 64 mbs per card and a full resolution jpg 2048*1536 32 bit at 1/4 compression is about 900k), thus allowing more time to take pistures instead of changing film.
- easier to print to newspapers since it has to be digitized anyway to get there.
- and more....

Simple Solution

[fiber_halo]

Just bring plenty of "film". Whether that's extra flash cards or extra rolls. Any real photographer is NOT going to run out of film. If they do, they are just an amateur.

On reading the article...

[Usquebaugh]

I'm struck by how she assumes people believe what they see. The first thing I do is question the reasons why I'm being shown a picture. TV news is an example of using images to stir up emotion. Notice how little information is being broadcast from the war zones around the world?

Secondly what did we do before we had cameras? History is not lost, pictures gives us minute details about an event in history.

JFK was a prime example of pictures stirring emotions but very little else!

Ministry of Truth

[Robert1]

Yup, just like 1984. When you don't like something in the past simply change it in the picture, only this time you won't have to burn the originals by sending them down a little vent; it'll all be digital.

She's concerned with good reason ...

[ninewands]

The ability to instantly cull photos that digital photography allows might just result in the loss of a significant portion of our pictorial history. Some of the greatest photojournalistic coups of all time were accidental ... things caught in the background of a photo that were only discovered on later examination ... many of these priceless records would have been lost if the pics they were found in could have been trashed instantly because "the light isn't right" or the composition sucks.

As for concern about digital-only storage, this concern is well-founded too. How do you recover the data when readers for the media are no longer available? Seen any 8" floppies lately? How about 5.25"? The cost of transferring terabytes of archives to new media has cost the loss of literally TONS of data. Film (preferably black and white, or separations on black and white film) is the ONLY suitable medium for archiving image data.

Re:Easily solved

[DNS-and-BIND]

Memory cards are not cheap, in some cases the cost of the higher-capacity cards can easily exceed the cost of the digital camera.

Digital Storage vs. Print Storage

[Bonker]

When I take a digital photo, it goes on a Sony Memory-stick. I copy it over to CDR.

The average lifespan of a CD is about 20 years. Slightly less if you use CDR.

We still have some of the very first photos taken, about 150 years ago... around the time of the end of the civil war. They're in pretty bad shape however. The ones that are best preserved are kept in airtight storage. Nobody ever gets to look at them. Only their copies... And with each successive analogue copy, even with the most loving attention to preserving the quality of the original, a little is lost.

Twenty years from now, if I'm dilligent, I can copy all my CDR to Super-DVDR or whatever. I'll have perfect digital copies of everything I kept before... if I was dilligent and made backups in case of fire, etc.

Twenty years from now, the only format we'll be able to see most of the ancient photos we have will be digital. Those who own them will no doubt be dilligent in making sure both the originals and the digital copies are kept secure one way or the other.

Fifty Years from now, I can make copies of my Super-DVDR to Quantum Storage, or something similiar.

Fifty Years from now, those ancient photos will still reside in a digital format, probably alongside my digital photos.

Even when the copies of the copies have broken down, if we're careful and follow data saftey and purity rules, we'll still have digital versions of
*all* the photos. The question you have to ask yourself is that digital storage the wave of the future, but can we, as a historically-minded society, be dilligent enough to make sure that our data is always secure?

Off-site backups on the moon, anyone?

Re:Digital Storage vs. Print Storage

[daviddennis]

Just in case you didn't notice, it's really difficult to lose a standard that's been accepted by enough people to have critical mass.

I don't see GIF and JPG images becoming unreadable, ever, because there's too much of a critical mass of information associated with them now, and that useful pile of information continues to be added to on a daily basis.

Yes, better technology will emerge, but the old standard image formats will still have a place.

D

Re:Digital Storage vs. Print Storage

[Bonker]

Sure - you should be able to make perfect digital copies, or even make ternary or quadrany copies... But who's going to have the reader to interpret those bits? Unless you keep that CD of Photoshop or Gimp backed up, with a CPU that can run it - you may have to re-write your own program to interpret the binary and display it as an image.

The oldest image format I can find is 'PIC' which was used by PC Paint in 1984, right around the time PC's could start representing image data on their screens. ACDsee, Photoshop, Gimp, and Irfanview still all support this format, even though it is
horribly limited, and very nearly 20 years old.

Even before that, people have been trading ASCII-style art since the invention of the Teletype. Sure, it's not supported by most graphic programs, because you only need a text editor to view it.

One of the most popular formats for a long time was 'PCX', which was created by Zsoft in 86, I beleive. PCX format later became Microsoft BMP format. The two are fairly similiar in construction, except that BMP's are not limited to 8 bit color. A lot of webmasters still use Gif87 despite the fact that PNG is better in many ways. No image program I know
of does not support Gif87 in one way or another. (Gimp users can download those illegal plugins, remember.)

Today, you can represent an image in more detail than the human eye can see with a 24 bit image. You can print it out how ever large you want it, assuming you have a large enough lens to capture it, and enough disk space to store the pixels. Then you can choose to compress it either losslessly or lossy. We've pretty much hit the end of the road for image file formats. Their may be more formats that come along in the future that compress better or have special features, but you can bet your bottom dollar that common image formats of today will be supported by computer software for decades, if not centuries to come.

By that time, who would want to waste time on 2-D non-holographic static images? They'd be boring, you wouldn't be able to taste or smell anything...


Same reason we still look at and keep glass-plate photos of Civil-War Era scenes. It's a look back in history. The only photos we'll have until your holo-photos arrive will be Boring 2-d's. Sure, they may not be as wonderful as a more immersive format, but you can bet that they'll still be a major part of our society's history.

Re:Digital Storage vs. Print Storage

[Rocketboy]

Twenty years from now, if I'm dilligent, I can copy all my CDR to Super-DVDR or whatever.

Fifty Years from now, I can make copies of my Super-DVDR to Quantum Storage, or something similiar

Once a negative has been processed you don't need to do anything to preserve it: it just sits there like last semester's lousy English grade. But, as pointed out in your post, to preserve a digital image people have to take action, repeatedly, on a regular basis. Twenty years from now, will you look at your 200 GB archive of digital photos and copy/reformat all of them to new storage? Frankly, I seriously doubt it. You're going to have other interests, other things to do. You'll do those that are important to you but the others will die. Each generation you'll have perfect bitwise copies of some of your images, with newer ones taking precidence over older ones. Digital images will disappear because we will choose to lose them, each of us trusting to our own judgement.

So what's wrong with that? Aren't my own personal family pictures my own business? Yep. But news agencies are going to make the same decisions and come to the same conclusions. That's a shared heritage which is socially and legally unrecognized: if news agencies decided to erase all but the dozen most popular images of the World Trade Towers, or of Einstein, or Linus, or Alan Cox, who's to stop them? Should that happen? Stupid question: it will happen whether it's good or not, regardless of how any of us feel about it.

The film photographs I make will (probably) never be famous or important to anyone but me. But they're well stored and a century from now, when I've long ago emigrated to the Martian colony and am preparing for the first interstellar colonization trip, my great-grandkids will have the opportunity to see what that old fart (me!) was like in the bad old days. They may choose not to look -- that's their decision. I prefer to leave it to them, rather than making it for them now, by destroying the negatives. With digital, it will take effort to preserve the photos, with film, it takes effort to destroy them.

mjs

Senseless

[CaseyB]

Typical old-school elitism, pure and simple. There is nothing about digital photography that makes it fundamentally different from film.

When you shoot traditional stills, you shoot rolls of film and there are a series of pictures taken while you wait for the news to happen.

Sequential file naming creates a "series" in precisely the same sense.

But, because of storage issues on the camera, he will have to delete some of those images as he goes along.

Oh please. I've got a consumer-grade digital camera that'll shoot over 1000 medium-res pictures without swapping storage. How long ago was this written?

Surely in those circumstances, when only certain photographers are getting access to certain scenes, the more information we have, the better

"Please, please, please, don't let new technology make my entire life's work completely useless! Please continue paying me for my antiquated skills!" Sad.

The Fragility of Digital Information

[Black Acid]

For anyone interested, there is a good article by Research Libraries Group entitled Preserving Digital Information. My favorite excerpt:

Digital technology, however, poses new threats and problems as well as new opportunities. Its functionality comes with complexity. Anyone with a compass (or a clear night to view the position of the stars in relation to true north) could theoretically set up or repair a sundial. A digital watch is more useful and accurate for telling time than a sundial, but few people can repair it or even understand how it works. Reading and understanding information in digital form requires equipment and software, which is changing constantly and may not be available within a decade of its introduction. Who today has a punched card reader, a Dectape drive, or a working copy of FORTRAN II? Even newer technology such as 9-track tape is rapidly becoming obsolete. We cannot save the machines if there are no spare parts available, and we cannot save the software if no one is left who knows how to use it.

With the storage evolving so rapidly, one must ask the question whether you'll be able to your present hard disk decades in the future. My personal recommendation is the obvious: to make physical, hard copies of all important data. Although Kodak claims their CDR media lasts 100 years or more, I still wouldn't hesitate to make physical copies, readable by humans rather than computers.

Re:Easily solved

[CaseyB]

in some cases the cost of the higher-capacity cards can easily exceed the cost of the digital camera.

Bull. 1G Microdrives are selling for about $350. And this is while the technology is still new. Storage cost is a complete non-issue.

This doesn't make sense

[daviddennis]

Far as I can tell, most digital images are stored in the JPG format, and the sheer volume of images on the web should ensure its immortality.

I would expect that 100 years from now, we'll still have tools that can read GIF and JPG formats, simply due to the critical mass that has already been established.

D

Luddites 'r' Us

[nyquist_theorem]

I sincerely hope that this was an undergraduate thesis and not doctoral-level stuff. I sure wouldn't want to have to defend it! :) It seems not only is Ms. West presenting a weak argument, it seems that an application of common sense would suggest the exact OPPOSITE hypotheses to the ones she chose to defend. Allow me...

Issue #1 - But, because of storage issues on the camera, he will have to delete some of those images as he goes along. I know everyone on /. is harping on this for being inaccurate, but I'd go one further. Digital "film", regardless of media type, is SO cheap and so reuseable that the digital photographer takes MORE pictures, not less. Hey, they're free, right? Click click click click click. Argument inverted.

Issue #2 - A whole collection of material, that may well be far more interesting in the months and years after the event than in the hard news context, is being lost at that stage. Lets imagine photographer A is old-school SLR-boy, and he took 1000 pictures of a given news event. Photographer B is techno-girl, with her 7-bazillipixel Sony Megivica. She takes 500 pictures, because she was told by her ill-informed friend Jayne West that she should delete half the ones she takes.

Now imagine this news event turns out to be worthy of going thru the "dud" pictures afterwards. What is more easily examined after the fact - 500 digital pictures (click click zoom zoom enhance enhance hey lets email this to the expert in LA) or 1000 negatives (lets make chemical soup x 1000 and bust out the magnifying glasses)? Even if the hypothesis about "less digital photos remain" holds true (which is preposterous), certainly the accessibility of the digital images more than makes up for it - if a diligent investigator / journalist can access the images from his or her desk or dump them on his or her laptop, then they're ten times more likely to peruse the images for shady stuff in the background. Argument inverted.

Issue #3 - Obviously off-site backup of perfect-copy images is an impossibility in the land of real film, but a nightly automated process in digital film land. Not to mention that optical media and redundant backups means a virtually infinite shelf life, versus the sub-century longevity of developed 35mm film. Argument inverted.

I'm surprised the silly "digital photography means you can't prove faked images" argument wasn't raised by our loom-burning film lover.

Issue #4 - In some ways, it's no different to the invention of the telegraph a 100 odd years ago, when it suddenly became possible to transmit messages over long distances in a very short space of time.

This is RUBBISH. A telegraph was ephemeral - a transmission and a disposable record of the message sent. Digital photography opens the doors to PERFECT, archival of INFINITE DURATION (with refreshing and conversion to current media, all of which is lossless). Could a worse example have been chosen? She could have compared it to the invention of the electic can opener and been less out to lunch.

Issue #5 - We don't have the build-up, we don't have the aftermath, we don't have incidental shots of who was there. Au contraire, mon ananas. If you're reloading every 24/36 shots, you're taking a lot less incidental shots than if your camera will hold 200+ images. Not to mention those cameras that permit the recording of simple video and/or audio in case all hell breaks loose. Would that not provide more build-up, more aftermath, and more incidental shots?

I could go on but I guess a lot of this is pretty obvious. Strange day on /. today - I'm surprised I didn't have to pay to download the PDF from BBC! :)

Re:Easily solved

[Ldir]

I see two pieces of the problem. As discussed, the first issue is storage capacity. The second factor is ease of editing. I think #2 is where we will lose more images.

The storage capacity issue is easy to address. A film photographer carries several rolls of film. A digital photographer can carry more or larger memory cards. There's no reason a digital photographer can't take and keep hundreds of pictures if necessary.

I suspect the problem really begins once the photographer gets back to the office. He may have been too busy to do editing in the field, but he might take the time once he gets back. If he doesn't, his editor might. Maybe they have a librarian that manages their archive. The point is, someone in the office will ultimately decide what is kept and what is deleted.

This is the big difference compared to film. In the world of film, it's customary to file the whole roll of negatives. It's a lot easier than picking through each roll and clipping individual frames, plus the film is easier to handle and store if it's kept in strips.

Storage cost with film isn't really a big issue either. Because of the way film is organized and stored, you don't save much storage space by clipping frames. It can even take more space than filing complete strips. By default, unless you decide that every frame on the roll is junk, you will probably keep everything.

In the digital world, the opposite is often true. Someone has to decide which images to archive. The rest are deleted. Of course you can archive all of the image files, but there's little practical reason to do so. Why bother when it's so easy to pick the ones you want?

And, unlike film, storage costs are an issue for digital images. There can be a direct increase in storage costs for keeping everything vs. selecting a few images. If your custom is to store each shoot on a separate CD, then keeping everything isn't an issue. If you're using online storage or consolidating multiple sessions on a single piece of media, then culling your work saves money.

I'm concerned that just giving digital photographers more/bigger memory cards won't help the problem. We really need a commitment to archive all of the images taken. Then we can worry about finding a digital medium that we can still use in 100 years.

Re:Easily solved

[david duncan scott]

Precisely, they'll be shooting more.

"Let's see, go back to the truck and get more RAM cards, or stay here in the riot and take more pictures..."

They didn't used to keep them all because they wanted to, they kept them all because they had to, and it had the beneficial side effect of a greater historical record. Now that they don't need to keep the runts, they won't -- and we'll never see them.

You missed this.

[El Camino SS]

(This article sponsored by Eastman-Kodak)

A more reasonable concern

[mwdib]

Well, these days you can write a history thesis on just about anything....

As a professional historian, I actually think the greater potential impact of digital media on the historical record lies in it's vulnerability. Those who have undertaken the task of "rewriting history" to fit a particular agenda or world view in the past faced a profound obstacle: the existance of the physical record. Burning books, destroying documents, and manufacturing evidence took a lot of energy on the part of the Soviets & the Nazis [ and lots of others ]. Will electronic documentation have the same persistence that the physical record had? Or will the tyrant-de-jour simply order the re-creation of the historical record by virtue of a well-constructed worm? You'll recall the industry of historical revision in Brave New World. Hmmm... interesting, but I won't lose sleep over it.

Re:Copy of a copy of a copy...

[kin_korn_karn]

Hello? What about PRINTING THE DAMN DIGITAL PHOTO???

Why hasn't anyone thought of this yet? My dad takes amazing pictures with his Kodak (can't remember the model) and prints them on an inkjet printer to photo paper. I cannot tell a difference between it and film.

The real threat of digital media...

[DennyK]

...is not just what might be lost to deletion. In terms of raw storage space, a 650MB CD-R has a bookshelf full of books, boxes, negatives, etc. beat hands-down. The real problems that I see with digital storage have nothing to do with the longevity of the data itself. There are several issues that have great bearing on the preservation of history when it comes to digital media, however.

One of the biggest issues is the *accessibility* of the data. Anyone who can see is capable of looking at a hundred year old photograph. Most fairly literate adults would be capable of reading (or at least puzzling out) a written document that dates back dozens or even hundreds of years. You have to go back many centuries before you require more than a good knowledge of the current language and a strong light source in order to read someone's old letters, and even then, all it takes is an education in the proper language of the period. No special tools required; just the proper knowledge.

With digital media, this is no longer the case. No human I know of is capable of reading a CD-R by eye. To access data stored in this fashion, you need a computer with the proper hardware and software. At this time, this presents no problem; few computers today come without CD-ROM drives, and you'd be hard-pressed to find someone with absolutely no access to one. But that may not be the case tomorrow. Ten years from now, CDs may be obsolete (sooner, if the RIAA has it's way...), and then it will be hard to find a machine that can read one, except in the workshop of some computer hobbyists. In twenty years, the number of people with access to an obsolete medium will be very small. In fifty years, it would be virtually impossible to find someone with equipment that can access the data. In a hundred years, few, if any, ordinary people will even know what the hell a CD is, much less know what to do with it. Think about it...how many of you out there could access data on an 8" disk? How many of you know someone who might be able to? I'd guess the numbers are relatively few, and this is a technology that, relatively speaking, is not all that old. And that was a common format. What about people who are storing data on less common media, like LS-120 disks or JAZ drives? Anyone around here have a drive that can read a flopticle? An optical disc? I was using those myself to store data just six or seven years ago in high school, but I'd be hard pressed now to find the hardware and software to read them.

Another problem that occurs, and is related to what Ms. West wrote, is the transitory nature of everyday electronic communication. Personal communications like letters are perhaps one of the best windows into the everyday life of people who lived long ago. Today, though, email and voicemail have replaced letters as the predominant form of communication. While this is great in terms of speed and efficiency, it also lacks the longevity of a handwritten letter. Many people saved old letters for years, and kept them in the family. Most people I know don't even save their emails for a week before they're consigned to the void. I'm an obsessive-compulsive pack rat who doesn't throw anything away, so I have email that dates back six years and three computer systems, but I am far from normal in that regard...and in ten or fifteen years, chances are very good that I'll lose all of that mail somewhere along the way. And when email is lost, it isn't buried in a long-forgotten box in a dusty attic somewhere, waiting for someone to stumble on it one day in the future. When email is "lost," it's gone for good. The chances of any personal email communication (barring spam, famous chain letters, etc.) lasting more than ten years are slim to none. Use of "snail mail" for personal communication has declined sharply in recent years, as people move to email and other forms of electronic communication. Stuff like the current anthrax scares will only make more and more people turn to electronic communication as a safer, cheaper, faster alternative. But as they do, the trail of personal information they leave for future generations becomes smaller and smaller. A hundred years from now, our descendants will know far less about us than we know about those who celebrated the dawn of the 1900s. The effective lifetime of the records we leave behind has shrunk significantly, from centuries to decades, or even mere years. It's kind of scary when you realize that in fifty years, such an enourmous chunk of what defines this time period will likely be gone without a trace. The more we move to electronic communication as a way of life, the larger that chunk will be. One day, we may have no history except that which is passed down directly from generation to generation...much like the days before written language was invented. Strange thought, isn't it?

DennyK

Editors should read the story.

[arcade]

Slashdot editors should re-read the story instead of making out of hand comments.

West is _not_ criticizing the images that actually get published. She is criticizing all that get deleted. You don't go ahead and save every image you take to your harddrive, as you then have to buy a new harddrive all the time. Its much more convenient to just delete what you think is irrelevant at the moment.

With a film that is not possible. The film stores it, at least "semi-permanent", that is, at least a couple of years or 20.
Of course, you get a buttload of film to handle, and someone needs to review all that film, but thats beside the point.
The point is that she worries that history get lost, due to all the deletion of material. She would NOT be worried, if every journalist/photographer just saved _everything_ to harddrives, and never deleted any pictures. _Then_ she, according to her article, would be perfectly happy with it (she doesn't say so, but its obvious out of her article).

Re:She's right, at least in part

[darkonc]

I could take a picture of a sports game with a regular camera and think to myself "aw it's a nothing shot" and set it and it's negative on fire in an ashtray.

The point is that very few people do burn their negatives.

In my closet, I have stereo slides taken in the '50s by my dad from before he met my mother. I also have most of the negatives from my childhood, and thousands of negatives that I've shot since then. Negatives are relatively compact, and easy to store for a couple of decades (longer than that and you should be explicitly nice to them).

What we're dealing with in this digital vs film case is the default path for the 'uninteresting' pictures. With film, the photographer would drop of a bag of film rolls at the processing lab, and the editor would get a stack of negatives, chose one (or a few) and be done with it.

In this case, you now have, besides the one or two printed pictures, another dozen or hundred that didn't make the grade, today. For the most part, these pictures cannot be reused, but it is pretty easy to put the spare pictures in a book and stick it on a shelf for a few years.

With digital, a couple of 'bad' pictures (like the picturs of clinton with 'that intern chick') might get culled before it even made it to the editorial desk. The images that aren't used, on the other hand, are on a $200 hard disk that is very reusable. One click of the mouse, and you once again have space for another 300 images.

Most consumers don't realize the quantity of film that a news photographer can go through. You don't count frames. You count rolls. If a news photographer tells you that he's got 3 rolls left, he's not bragging. He's probably worrying.

BTW: At 3Meg each, someone mentioned that his camera has room for 330 images (~ 9 rolls). This is about the number of pictures that I'll take at a friend's wedding. I'm not a news photographer, but I go through film like one. (must come from volunteering for community newspapers). A 20 GB drive wouldn't store a busy year's worth of my pictures at decent resolution. Then I would have to decide if I'm gonna try and fit another 20GB drive in my box or cull most of the pictures.
Listen to the sound of file pointers being zeroed

The digiphoto problem is true for newspapers

[dst]

I work for a medium-sized newspaper in Finland. At least there disappearance of archives is true.

First of all, usually the photographers send just a couple of pictures to the newsdesk. They've gone through the 128 MB selection of pictures, select maybe a dozen, then cut that down to two or three, edit them into shape and pass them on.

Then they erase rest of the photos. Short-sighted, maybe, but they simply don't have time or resources to save every one of those shots. At least with film you always got the pictures.

Then there's the archive. Not all the pictures that are passed on to the newsdesk are necessarily saved. They have to be commented, checked and so on.

I don't know how they coped with this a couple of years back when shooting film. Probably the same way they did with the news stories - the archives weren't that sophisticated, and maybe not even as complete.

But at least they were there.

It is easy for someone who doesn't shoot pictures for a living five days a week, sometimes doing 12-hour days, to say that digital storage is cheap and all the pictures should be saved.

When you're a news photographer, the cost and capacity of the medium is somewhat unimportant. It's all the other stuff that contributes to less digital photos being stored.

On the editing of photographs.

[loraksus]

FYI, some of the /.'ers here keep on spouting about 36 exposures to a roll. First off, if you do professional photography, you don't use 35mm - even so you can fit nearly 80 frames into a standard film canister - assuming you are not using a motor drive, which can hold a crapload more. 35mm is enough for most things, hell, most pictures in newspapers are of pathetically low quality, same thing for webpages.

Anyways, thats just a FYI

I realize that her point is more about the deletion of photos than the manipulation of photos, but even a begining photography student will understand that regular photos can be modified very easily. Hell - Manipulation of a photo is essentially required to win a photo competition.

I'd have to say that, to a certain extent, regular photographs are more suceptible to editing - when you develop a picture yourself (i.e. not at costco [which btw kicks ass]) you develop it with your own, unique touch - assuming you even bother to enlarge it (you make a contact sheet before you begin enlarging, deciding which photographs you will develop, and which ones you will not, and the majority will never be developed past the contact sheet stage because it takes a nice chunk of time for each frame that you blow up) Anyways, each person develops the frame in their own way, even depending on how they feel. This process is essentially editing - whether be it cropping, color balancing, over / underexposing, dodging / burining sections, et cetera. Every image is edited.

In all the frames I've developed, there is not one picture that I have tweaked to make it look "better".

Face it - the accurate recording of history is a naieve dream. Photography, like anything else, is subjective.

Re:The real danger

[yatest5]

What a bunch of crap! If we can decipher age-old languages, methinks future civilisations will be able to 'work out', or even 'look up', how to read the data on a cd.

Comments from one who worked at a newspaper...

[hyrdra]

I worked for the Columbus Dispatch in Columbus, Ohio as an intern in the photography department.

This article, while brining up a few interesting points about digital and how it may or could change things, what I actually saw and was a part of painted a different picture, but this may be only unique to this one newspaper.

The photographers were all armed with Canon EOS digitals, I had my own Olympus E-10 and some had the new Nikon D1X, which is quite possibly the greatest digital camera to ever exist.

Anyway, most had 256 MB CF cards or in the case of the Canon digitals, several GB PCMCIA drives which could hold thousands of full quality, often times RAW (uncompressed) pictures. Those with CF cards could hold about 40 raw pictures per CF, or around 200 1/2.8 JPEGs (still very high quality). The best part of all is we could share the cards, so if one didn't need 50 MB on their card and someone else did, we could use their card. Try doing that with a half exposed roll of film.

Most of us shot in high quality JPEG, because you couldn't tell the difference between that and raw if you didn't magnify the image 5x. This saved space, which is still valuable, and affored us the quality we needed for front page spreads.

When we would finish a shoot, we would save all the digital images on CD. The film guys, on the other hand, would throw away the negatives that didn't make the cut. There was simply no place to put them and the care and cost of chemicals required to maintain them was too expensive. However, all our images were backed up on CDs and filed in a safe. Pure, digital copies of our work. In other cases we would have a laptop on site and would simply slide our CF in with a PCMCIA adapter and in 5 minutes have 200 more shots ready.

I think the situation this woman speaks of is that like the early days of digital, when you were limited to $250 32 MB cards. However, today a 320 MB CompactFlash card can be had for under $100, and a 1 GB micro-drive is around $400. I rarely think a photographer brings enough film for 3500+ pictures on one shoot, which one could fit on a microdrive with a small laptop (over 100 roles of film). Plus, the 2 GB and 5 GB microdrive versions are just on the horizon, offering even more on field capacity.

In fact, if anything, the cheapness of digital makes photographers take more pictures. Lets not forget the time factor. There is NO developing, no scanning, etc. You can take a laptop and even transfer the images back by modem if needed, or plug into the nearest network. And today, when all layout is done on computers, this just makes sense.

I think this woman tried digital when it was in its infancy and backed away from it and now has a film only attitude. Well, she should really try the Nikon D1X SLR and a 1 GB microdrive. I think she'll be leaving film for good when she gets some of the images from that camera (which technically has greater resolution and dynamic range than a 35 MM negative).

Even my Olympus E-10, a prosumer model, rivals film to the point where the images from the camera are sharper than any scans I can get from a 35 MM negative.

Also, there was something mentioned about the durability of film vs. digital. Well, may I remind you that film cannot be kept in hot temperatures. This is why people refrigerate their film (before and after exposure). Digital has no problems in hot weather, albeit the CCD does produce more noise when the temperature rises, it doesn't completly fade away the picture like film would. In the cold, dew forms on film negatives and moisture damage is a huge problem. With digital this isn't a problem at all, and most CCDs perform better in the cold.

The best part about digital is that its a growing field. It follows Moore's law, and in five years we could be looking at over 20 mega-pixels of resolution at all types of ISOs (film has only one ISO while the D1X can go from 100-800 by pressing a button), greater than medium format and rivaling large format. This is greater resolution than 35 MM will ever be able to provide.

All through that women's article I find it odd no one has mentioned she is attacking digital archival. She seems to think digital will reduce the nation's photographic libraries, when other mediums, such as print, etc. have been the poster child for digital archival and everyone is so glad the old days of microfilm and paper are over. In fact, digital archival for photographs is easily suited for the task. It's much easier to query a database for "September 11th 2nd Plane" than look through an entire seleve of negatives, or go through a convoluted filing system. When I worked, all digital images would have to have a title, a description, where it was taken, and the identity of anyone pictured (if not a crowd shot). This is what we would do after we get back. The embedded EXIF data in the image, as recorded by the camera, took care of the date, ISO, shutter speed, and other technical information (again, not present with film). This would then go onto an online storage and retreival system, and backed up on CD.

Now as for being an on-site editor, as someone mentioned, and having different goals, this just simply isn't true. An editor and a photographer both have the same goal: getting a good picture. When the photographer arrives back, often times there simply are no *really* good pictures to choose from (you know the feeling of "This one's good enough, go with it."). However, with digital's instant preview of a captured image, a photographer can instantly gauge his efforts and dynamically adjust his shooting style based upon his output. He can progressivly work to attain a greater image by building upon the one he just took, which is impossible with film. This is what we did at an event, and since we were editing on site, we had the benefit to go and take more pictures. Back in the film room with a magnifying glass you are only limited to the selection of what was took -- in many cases that one picture you "had in mind" was lost forever. However at the scene we have the benefit of doing a reshoot without even having to step foot in a darkroom.

My only current complaint with digital is the time factor. Film is still faster at taking images, while digital sometimes makes you wait while saving and compressing images. This is a temporary problem which will soon be corrected as embedded processors get faster and portable storage write speeds increase. Still, this is one area where film wins. Still though, the two and three second waits of today's professional models are getting very close to what film is capable of and burst mode on many cameras gives good results, especially when you're in the middle of a press mob and you only have a few seconds to snap that picture of your subject -- every frame per second counts.

Now, it seems, film is nearing death and the last survivors are clinging onto it like one would with a sick family member. Digital is here to stay, is growing, and no matter what arguments that woman seems to claim, it's the new way for all types of photography. I sent her an e-mail with a link to the D1X and a copy of this post. I think she's just about to change her mind...

Film and negative are archival--NOT!

[HardFocus]

West argues that we could loose valuable pictorial records. I argue
that we are anyway. I am not a photojournalist but I have had this discussion
with news photographers in the past and the picture they paint is that most
newspapers are terrible with archive issues.

Start with film processing: In the rush to get things to press, they are neither
fixed nor washed for the recommended times. Then, if they are filed at all,
they will end up in some cabinet (where the file folders and news-clippings,
etc. are anything but acid free) filed under "miscellaneous". These
negatives will not have much usable image in 50 years, if they can find
them at all. All these issues apply for prints made from these negatives, too.

What digital is doing for the newspapers is taking the task of archiving and
indexing from the realm of impossible to plausible.

Regarding some of the /. comments:

I don't buy the arguments about running out of film. Running out of film is
simply unprofessional.

I don't buy the arguments about labs screwing up the film (unless the lab is
the newspapers' mentioned above). For Black & White (events coverage &
artistic), I process my own. For commercial work I choose my labs with care.
The problems have been no more frequent than mechanical failure of my equipment
and, fortunately, those problems have all been related to output (i.e., prints--not
transparencies or negs).

I don't buy the argument that memory is too expensive. Expense is not the issue
for a professional. The real issue here is capacity, speed and reliability.
Never mind changing cards in the middle of a shoot--it takes too bloody long!
Ditto for editing to save memory. Shoot now. Edit tomorrow. Just give me a 500GB
PCMCIA card and I'll be happy. ;-)

Re:What about power...

[jandrese]

How many film cameras these days still work if they run out of power? Other than some of the very cheap point-n-shoot varieties and some of low end SLR bodies not too many. Have you looked a CF cards? 128MB or 256MB models are reasonably priced (
If you are in the middle of nowherezistan then it probably makes sense to carry around film, but I'd consider that the exception rather than the rule.

Oh come on....

[dcigary]

Just about any photographer worth their salt isn't going to throw away ANY shot. The technology exists out there to dump memory cards to devices (http://www.mindsgear.com), get extra memory cards, or just bring along a cheap laptop to dump to while there isn't any news going on. Looks like the so-called "Experienced" photographer isn't very "Experienced" with digital photography technology yet...

eh, I read it -- she's simply wrong, IMO :)

[timothy]

I just disagree completely with her claims. (Well, not "completely," since they have certain truthful elements, but I do disagree with her conclusions.)

Conventional photography does have some advantages, among them the fact that it's often easier to keep unwanted photos around (in the form of negatives at least) than to discard them. OK. That's interesting and good, in a glass-half-full way. Books also trap insects sometimes, so they're useful to historical entomologists who want to see what mites Napoleon kept in his diary -- OK. True, and perhaps occasionally with highly interesting outcomes, but I think at heart still a trivial claim.

If you had film that you *could* re-use if you were unsatisfied with the image it contained, or if you were simply running short of film, would you? I would. I have taken a lot of crap photographs in my life, and would trade much for that ability ;)

That would mean dropping some possibly interesting shots, sure (30 years from now, I might find that the newest President was my age and on vacation at the same beach I was in 1998, and want to see if I had an accidental shot of him making dirty gestures at lifeguards ... OK, could happen), but it would also mean that I could take images I more wanted to keep in the first place.

Hypothetical losses vs. quantifiable gains puts a pretty big burden of proof on the hypothetical losses before I'm interested.

I find negatives a lot more annoying than digital files, but then I'm spoiled by digital in a lot of ways. On the trip I just took to Austin, I took a lot of pictures, showed them to the subject or emailed them the results ... with film, this would be such a hassle I probably never would.

And really, the idea that we're "losing information" because digital allows easy deletion / overwriting of data I think is spurious in the first place. I dunno how many exposures the typical pro photographer carries for a day of shooting -- perhaps 500? I bet less than a thousand, anyhow ... whatever the number, they still want to take images worth keeping -- not just shoot randomly to play some very high odds. Editing is part of it, and I bet most photographers would say they edit 99% of their shots just by choosing when to squeeze the release.

Film is finite, even when you have a lot of it -- people don't indiscriminantly shoot film, no matter *how* much they have, if only because it might mean missing an anticipated vital moment because it's time to change rolls. Ever roll shot takes time / money / attention to develop and choose images -- being able (for instance) to knock out the top and bottom of a bracketed series doesn't "rob history" of anything particular, except in the sense that not shooting a continuous video feed of every day from every angle and keeping it at highest quality settings forever robs history.

Photography is a selective process; I think the advantages of digital storage, sorting and transmission (though flawed) win hugely over film, even though film still has greater resolution for the most part part. (In some areas it's getting a *little* closer ... or even a lot -- Hard to tell a lot of D1x images aren't film when you see them in typical magazine resolution.) For people with well-developed and pushed-to-the-limit conventional photo systems, the same thing might not hold, but I'm not one of them :)

The point is, you choose with any sort of photography what to commit to your sensor (film or ccd or coated tin plate or whatever) at several levels, by selecting your location (to the degree you can), the time of day (if possible), the light (if you can influence it), the awareness of your subject (if applicable), the type of lens, the depth of field, the shutter speed, whether handheld or tripod, etc. Great. Digital adds another level by allowing you to get rid of unsatisfactory ones and "magically" extend your blank space. Are all the lens cap shots in the world a valuable addition to history? ;) Defending a technology for its accidental benefits I think needs a lot more than what she's portrayed here as offering. Maybe the full thesis would be more satisfying.

cheers,

timothy

Re:has anyone considered...

[Russ Steffen]

News Flash: Traditional photos just as easy to alter as digital photos. Film at 11.

Seriously, the availabity of high resolution scanners and slide printers means it's just as easy to scan and alter and reprint a standard photo as it is to alter on that started digital.