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

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.

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

[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: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: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