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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.
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.
utter rubbish
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?
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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
...which isn't much at all for news shooter. Those guys crank through film. It's not like they buy it at the Rite Aid -- they get those shrink-wrapped blocks of what, 20 or 25 rolls? "Film is cheap, shots are expensive."
Point is that with film there was no choice in the matter. With 35mm film, nobody is going to develop just the good frames, and it's not even worth cutting the bad ones out of the strip. They stay in the archive because there's no reason to remove them -- you can't reuse the medium anyway.
Digital media are reusable, and will be reused as soon as there's an issue. Even if the media were free and weightless, shooters would still edit and make room just in case another shot comes along.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
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.
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?
One example, as related to me by John Shaw, a well known nature photographer.
The well-known shot of Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton hugging at some convention? I think it was captured on video as well. But the one (out of dozens) of still photographers that caught it, and the one that had their picture published all over the world? It was shot on film. All the other press photographers in attendance at that event were shooting digital cameras (digital is now quite prevelant in photojournalism, in large part because of the short turn around time for processing and transmission, but also because quality doesn't matter nearly as much as timeliness). At the time, Monica Lewinsky was a nobody, one of dozens of White House interns.
All the photographers shooting with digital thought: "ah, a nothing shot" and deleted it. When the story broke and the shit hit the fan, who was the one still photographer who had a shot of this? The one shooting on film.
As a nature photographer, digital isn't there yet. Never mind the resolution, etc., but if you're in the jungles of Borneo, or amongst the penguins in Antarctica, or wherever for an extended period, it's still a heck of a lot easier to schlep a bunch of film than a bunch of memory cards, and to know that it will more or less stand up to the conditions.
Many professional photographers have more than one camera body, sometimes for different films, but mostly for backup. If you're on an important shoot, you need backup. If you're shooting with a film camera, that's easy. If you're shooting with digital, that means some way of backing up your memory cards. Which generally means a laptop. Which if you're serious and/or off the beaten path, means you take a backup for it, too. Starting to get the picture?
I'm not saying that digital photography is the problem behind of all this. But the number of photographs that on film that are viewable now from 100 years ago, vs. the number that are shot on digital and will be viewable 100 years from now is probably not comparable. If you find a trunk of old photos from 100 years ago, you'll probably at least go through it once. If you find an old CD 100 years from now, you might think "huh! How quaint! It's like one of those old 45s my grandpa talked about". And those photos will probably never be seen again.