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Digital STINKS - Page 3

post #61 of 120
2/13/06 at 7:51pm
Quote:
Your point is taken, but I doubt there are many studios which ever used 10K of film per week. That equates, with processing, to a million dollars a year just in film and processing. I suppose there might have been such a studio, but have to wonder. Even if you meant film & processing, that is still half a mill a year. For me, when I shoot architecture, which is really the main issue I am dealing with (I know, I am the only one on earth shooting this, so it is a meaningless comment) we're talking 1.5-2 hours for a given shot, which means usually 4 sheets of 4x5 (or now, half a roll of 120) and a couple polaroids. Doing that type of work, how long would it take to justify the expense?

Again you assume they do that every week. But how many weeks do we need to have high volume in order to pay for a $50k digital back? This isn't rocket science here.

Quote:
I am assuming nothing. I am speaking of personal experience. Don't make assumptions.

Forgive me if I take;
Oh yeah, regarding the "ease of use" issue. You have no idea who much more time is required working on the computer with digital.

That as some sort of assumption that I have no idea what goes on in a dark room vs what goes in within photoshop.

Quote:
And show me where I said all, if even any pros hate digital. I was merely stating that all the ones I know were rather surprised at how much time they end up spending on the computer, and that thhe time savings ended up being little, if any. Now remember, I am talking about wedding & portrait photographers, so the volume of shots they are dealing with is far greater than I do.

Yea, imagine that. Instead of dropping film off at a lab and paying somebody to do the post processing work, they have to do it themselves and it takes longer. How many 'pros' actually do/did their own lab work?

Quote:
It is true for most markets that there are studios who use 10K of film per week. I can say with quite a bit of confidence that in my entire state (Colorado) there has never been a single studio who use 10K of film per week, ever. Maybe in an extrmem situation for one or two weeks, but regularly? Absolutely not.

There's not a single studio in your town that has ever 3,000 images in a week (assuming a rough $3/print to process)?

Quote:
I forgot, there are no longer any feature films, shorts or television shows produced on film stock. Yes, digital is a massive revolution. My point is that it is not what most people think it is. This thread only supports that, as far as I'm concerned.

Funny, I thought this thread was about photography with 35mm, medium and large formats. Are we now going to include 'video' into it all as well?

Quote:
I don't know if you have any idea how many people think buying a digital camera makes them talented or creative. Of course, we get back to the bottom line that they probably aren't worth dealing with anyway. One client put it best (I can't remember if I already said this) with digital, his shots are just as bad as they were with film, he just finds out a lot faster. I wish more people realized that.

I stopped visiting "regular" photography forums because of the above, the number of people who went out and dropped $2-3k on a nice little kit, and they want to start making money with photography (usually with wedding photography), yet they don't understand how the camera works, things like depth of field are totally foreign to them, or how to use the flash they just bought, etc, etc.
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post #62 of 120
2/13/06 at 7:53pm
John,

I'm pretty sure I understood what you meant all along. Let me say that while you may not know too many people who would think of themselves as software engineers, programmers or whatever-they-call-us, there are indeed plenty of such people who know little-to-nothing of the fundamentals of computer science and such much like the average Joe who buys a digital camera and thinks he's suddenly much better at photography.

I'm sure you're familiar w/ the term "hacks" even in your field. Well, that term probably means the same thing in mine. :wink:

FWIW, whenever I meet a "programmer" I never knew before, I always wonder whether he/she's just a hack or not. I'm just glad I don't (often) have to interview them (nor far worse, manage them), but maybe some day that will have to change -- or I might decide to change careers and become a "hack" in photography or something else for a change. :wink: Oh, I still remember a (vocational) high school teacher telling us we don't need to be any good at math to be a programmer -- boy, was I in for a rude awakening in college. :wink:

One more thing. The issue for us goes far deeper than that actually. It used to be that many of the stuff we take for granted today required a well paid programmer to do for each specific request. But advances in technologies (and applications of good sound theories and mathematics) have made much of that stuff automated, end-user doable, much easier for "hacks" to do, etc. That's not much different than going from fully manual photography to ever improving AI-assisted and advanced PP software assisted photography.

And AFAIK, there was also once upon a time when color photography required 3 separate exposures in one each of the 3 RGB color channels/glass plates and then required the photographer/developer to recomposite the 3 exposures into 1 for a color photograph. Interestingly, we still employ roughly the same principle today in the digital world, but the advances in technologies have certainly made the application of that principle infinitely more user-friendly, efficient and effective, don't you think?

_Man_
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post #63 of 120
2/13/06 at 8:12pm
Ajay,

Come on now. Be fair to John. You seem to continue to insist that his business model should be the same as (or very similar to) the pros you know. You're accusing him of assumptions, but you seem to be making lots of assumptions about John and what he *should* be doing too.

We don't all choose our professions only to make $$$ and for not much else afterall. If nothing else, John's point that the $$$ side of the business is turning photography from an art (and actually, science also) into not much more than a vehicle for commericalism is a valid and fairly self-evident point. It seems to happen w/ *all* of the arts, not just photography, and that's indeed a shame.

While I'm not a fan of Ken Rockwell's, there's certainly some truth to his little satire of 7 Levels of Photographers:

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/7.htm

Maybe in the end we really should just stick to being an "artist" or "amateur" and avoid aspiring to becoming the "professional", if we wish to be true to the art form and not let commercialism overtake our love for it. But I guess many who love and also work just try their best to keep the 2 sides separate and do both as if they lead completely different lives between the two. BTW, that happens in the software dev world too, FWIW...

_Man_
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post #64 of 120
2/13/06 at 8:21pm
Quote:
Come on now. Be fair to John. You seem to continue to insist that his business model should be the same as (or very similar to) the pros you know. You're accusing him of assumptions, but you seem to be making lots of assumptions about John and what he *should* be doing too.

I have made no such statement about John or his business, however I think it's not very fair to say "Digital STINKS" just because one does not use all of the tools that are around (and there is nothing wrong with that, some of those tools cost a ton of money). Or the fact that there is no sense at all in spending money on high end digital equipment, just because one or even many people's business don't support it.

But none of that changes the fact that film is dying and digital is taking over. And that day is a lot closer than some people think.
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post #65 of 120
2/13/06 at 8:31pm
Clearly I'm not qualified to continue arguing any of these technical points, but I would like to add a few more philosophical ones.

I think that a better thread title might have been 'Progress stinks'. Or 'Changes in market forces stink'. Putting up pixel peeping strawmen comparing digital backs versus individual films seems a fools errand at best. Digital is still in its infancy and the technologies will surely get better, cheaper and faster as time goes on. Workflows will be streamlined. Things, in general will continue to change for 20 or more years. Whole industries will rise and fall. As the ancient curse says, we will live in interesting times.

Quote:
Actually, it makes no difference if it is a valid comparison. If they are both situations where cheap is becoming all that matters, there is something wrong.

If anything, maybe this statement is what can give you hope. I see products competing with cheap every day, look no further than bottled water selling so briskly when clean, ordinary tap water would suffice. Maybe we just havent gotten to the point where the simple newness, the shine of digital photography hasnt worn off yet, and consumers havent been 'educated' that there are reasons why making an investment in a pro can still pay off when these cheap alternatives present themselves. Certainly pros have been competing with cheap 35 mm and polaroids for decades without too much angst against the uncle freds of the world.

Will there be a backlash against cheap digital? I dont know. But it would only take 1-2 people in my circle of friends having their weddings ruined by not having artistic, lasting memories of the day when they relied on relatives. As for other areas of photography, I'm less sure, but I do know that people tend to appreciate quality when it matters most, or is most visible.

Sam
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post #66 of 120
2/13/06 at 9:32pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Again you assume they do that every week. But how many weeks do we need to have high volume in order to pay for a $50k digital back? This isn't rocket science here.
I recalled something since my last post. A few years ago I happened to see the total lab expense (just processing and probably some prints) for who is probably the busiest commercial photographer in town. It was 25K. For the entire year. The fact is, while the figures you toss out may be remotely possible in some very large, assembly line type studios (though I doubt it), they are far from normal in the real world. Just in case you wonder, I assure you this guy rakes it in big time and shoots about as much as is humanly possible.

Quote:
There's not a single studio in your town that has ever 3,000 images in a week
3,000 4x5 images in a week? Absolutely not. Not here, not anywhere, unless possibly they had a couple dozen shooters running full bore all the time (and in which case they would need a couple dozen digital backs, not just one) or was a place doing extremely high volume copy work or something like that, but I don't picture them doing that on 4x5 and it is definitely not commercial photography or anything requiring the slightest bit of time or talent. I venture to guess even a portrait photographer shooting as fast as possible could not have 3,000 35mm shots in a week without half of them just being of a wall. How much time is being spent on each shot, 10 seconds? You guys who have actually shot 4x5 just stop and think for a minute about the basic logistics of shooting 3,000 sheets in a week.

Anyway Ajay, you are great at spewing out absurd figures and continue to back them up with no discernible explanation why you have the slightest idea what you are talking about.

Engaging "Kaplan" mode.




Sam, I intentionally titled the thread the way I did to make it provocative. I was hoping my immediately following it up with "did I get your attention?" would kind of spell that out without making it boringly obvious. Besides, I have said more then once since then that digital has real benefits and I am waiting for the day when it actually becomes what so many people think it is, as well as being more reasonably priced in the high end.
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post #67 of 120
2/13/06 at 9:40pm
Thread Starter 
Man, I was sadly bugged by the first several levels of the Rockwell bit, until I got to 2 and 1. Those are exactly the guys who are starting to piss me off. the sad thing is it may just be possible I was at level 7 at some point, but I have now dropped to 3. :p)
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post #68 of 120
2/13/06 at 9:42pm
The point is obviously lost by now since you want to argue the semantics. I don't know why it's hard to comprehend that plenty of people find a true cost benefit with the move to digital, even those spending $50k on a digital back. The petty insults though are really fun, you want to make a "provactive" thread, but when anybody disagree's with the whole foundation of your point, you get defensive and start throwing around insults and get just a bit condescending (have a need to mention your 'background' one more time?). As if there weren't hacks and wanna-be's when all there was around to use was film.

Andrew
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post #69 of 120
2/13/06 at 11:51pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Let me say that while you may not know too many people who would think of themselves as software engineers, programmers or whatever-they-call-us, there are indeed plenty of such people who know little-to-nothing of the fundamentals of computer science
Actually, one of my best friends, who I have known since my freshman year of college, is a software engineer, if that is the term. Maybe you know, or maybe you don't, but my alma-mater (RIT) is pretty big in computer technology. He is going through a similar type of situation as me, in a way. He owns an ISP but is finding that field increasingly difficult to work in.

In the last year or so, I have expanded into web site design and while I still have a geat deal to learn about the code side of things, I am amazed by how little a lot of people who have been doing it for years know. In fact, that was a major factor in me going into it. I got tangled with this guy who called himself a web designer, but his sites didn't work. Even though I knew nothing about html annd site design, I could look at how he did things and see why they didn't work. Then I started really looking at web sites and realizing how bad most of them were. So, with my design background and a general knack for pickinng up technical things, I realized I could do a better job than 95% of the web designers out there.

Of course, now I look at the first sites I did and know I would have done them differently behind the scenes, but they still look and work better than most, even if I could have coded them better. I will probably never get into the most sophisticated types of sites, particularly online stores, but I really don't wannt to. I'm just looking for an extension to the othher visual creation I like to do, to fill in the gaps during this very bad time in commercial photography.


I think most of you realize I don't actually think digital is a bad thing in and of itself. It's just that it has served as a catalyst for a lot of severely distorted impressions of what is needed to do good work. When the tools used, and they are nothing more than that, become such an obsession for so many people, something is wrong. It's funny because I used to get a lot of comments about how I must have to buy new equipment all the time because cameras change constantly. I would get such baffled looks when I would say " Not Really. Consumer cameras change constantly. The pro stuff doesn't." I also used to often be asked if I used a Hasselblad, because that was the only name most people knew that they associated with pros. Now they ask me how many megapixels my camera has, followed by telling me how many theirs has, with an air of superiority if theirs is higher. Or, they look at the view camera (if I am using it) and ask me if it's digital. I like that situation because then I say something like "sure, on the simple, low end stuff, but the good stuff is still always on film because the quality is so much better."

I admit, I am attached to photography and seeing that actual knowledge continues and not everyone just turns into computer manipulation freaks. I definitely get keyed up when I read comments which are absurd or ignorant, and I should just brush them off. If the day actually comes when actual experience no longer means anything, like some people wish was true, I hope I'm not around. It's a good thing that people like Rob Tomlin have taken the time to learn some silver processes (even if he is turning into a digital Judas :p) ) and people like Man have been motivated by digital to find a new hobby.

I think the main thing is that with such a sudden shift in one aspect of photography there are an awful lot of people who would like to think everything has been thrown out the window and they no longer have to know any of it. The fact is, the only thing that is changing is the manufacture annd form of the sensor, which is going from organic to electronic. The new sensor is definitely in it's early infancy, though it has come quite a way from the first ones I dealt with nearly 20 years ago. It isn't the answer to everything. What bothers me is a lot of people think it is.
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post #70 of 120
2/14/06 at 12:34am
That seems so very true, John -- and it's true w/ a great many other things too, not just photography. I think it all has more to do w/ people's prevailing wish for instant gratification, that shiny new "toy" (as Sam suggests) and various such things than anything else inherent to the object of our obsessions, etc. And admittedly, I'm certainly far from immune to that myself.

Still, though, John, w/ advances in technologies, there can also be advances in methodologies or perhaps, rather, advances in the application of methodologies, etc. and perhaps also significant paradigm shifts and real breakthroughs in the art form and relevant businesses and business models/practices. If I were the working pro, I would not want to dismiss the possibilities w/out looking deeper into them. Afterall, significant advances in the tools have certainly made new things possible all along throughout history. And AFAIK, all the art forms of major significance have gone through their fair share of evolutions and revolutions over time (and some may not even have much, if anything, to do w/ advances in tool set). Maybe the advances offered (and promised) by digital will lead to some major revolutions in this art form too. It certainly seems to be doing just that in the parallel art form of the cinema.

_Man_
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post #71 of 120
2/14/06 at 4:09am
I dont know about that Man-Fai. With the Mac leading the charge on easy entry to digital audio and video editing the same way Canon and Nikon and the other camera/software vendors are doing digital imaging, you would think that there would be a real explosion of GOOD quality experimental films. There certainly are some, but I was more excited when things like Short Video Journal were really pumped about this 5-6 years ago and not so much now today that things like SVJ have died off.

In all of this, it takes time for people to get beyond the shiny toys and into the artistry, and when so much of this stuff is marketed at gear heads like me its questionable just what slim percentage of us geeks will ever develop that artistic capability. It's hard work.

I think its easy for people like John to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of 'noobs with a nice camera', but I think over time this will stabilize and people will go back to looking for quality they can trust. It's going to be a rocky few years for people in those positions but for people like me (and you too I suspect!) this will be a golden age.

I used to wonder how content producers would make a living in the digital age, when everyone has access to both cheap tools and piracy is rampant. Today I'm still interested in that but I think its clearer that there will always be markets for talented people but its the intermediaries who have the most to fear. The RIAAs and the MPAAs and the big content networks. It wont be easy to compete for those artists, but its not the death sentence that the old school intermediaries are facing.

Sam
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post #72 of 120
2/14/06 at 10:32am
Sam,

I agree w/ your sentiments. When I mentioned the cinema at the end of that post, I was refering to stuff like special effects, CGI, the push to go all digital, etc. and how those kinds of things seem to be making some serious changes to certain parts/aspects of the film industry. But no, none of that stuff will ever replace true talent, particularly at the higher levels, as you point out. While advances in technologies *might* reduce the gap between the truly talented and the wannabe's, it also *might* work the other way and increase the gap too -- hard to predict me thinks. Such advances probably often do one thing for a certain kind of talent while the opposite for another kind of talent, so it may well depend on how multi-talented one is at the end of the day -- and when I say "talent" here, I mean specific skills/talents where a true master of photography (or whatever other art form or profession) might actually have many of them all useful toward the art form (and perhaps, also the business side of it).

_Man_
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post #73 of 120
2/14/06 at 12:27pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
While advances in technologies *might* reduce the gap between the truly talented and the wannabe's, it also *might* work the other way and increase the gap too
My impression is that typically it increases the gap at first. Take, for example, the first appearance of the Mac. All of a sudden people started doing desktop publishing and with the wysiwyg interface, they suddenly started throwing in every font they could get their hands on. They were so enamored by what they could do, they rarely stopped to think about whether they should, or whether it even looked good. "Ooh! Look at all the fonts I can put in this." I'm sure they thought thhey were incredibly creative because they could do that. Look at web design. How many sites are unbelievably cluttered or have so many animations annd thinks going on the make you dizzy? Same deal. The ability to make something happen is not that same as having a good sense of what to make happen.
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post #74 of 120
1/14/11 at 9:06pm

Rise! Rise from your grave!

 

*Casts necromancy spell*

 

I'm going to straight up agree - I dont like digital. Now, mind you I do think that Digital has it's place, but I just like the look of film SO much better. It's got better dynamic range, better colors, I like the look of the grain - I just think it's a superior format.

 

M'lard, if it please the court - here's exhibit A and B:

 

Interstates are for chumps

 

and

 

Why I shoot film

 

Both pictures are taken within seconds of each other, both are straight out of the camera (save for the film, which I underexposed slightly, so I increased it an f-stop or two). Otherwise, I didn't touch the colors, enhanced them or otherwise touched them up in any way. The top one was shot with a Rebel K2 on Fuji Reala and the bottom one was on a Rebel XSi, and I think the analog version looks WAY sexier.

 

The other area that film has it over digital? Black and white shooting. Digital B&W looks so flat, so bland. The contrasts aren't very strong, the blacks are tepid, the whites do nothing for me. Film, on the other hand looks really nice. Something like this shot just wouldn't look nearly as nice in digital:

 

Day 329/365 - Under the West Seattle Freeway

 

The other selling point - at least for me? The quality of my shots has gone WAY up since I started working with film again. Why? Because of the limited resources. With digital I found myself spamming, shooting with a pray and spray attitude, firing off 400 shots on an outing without blinking an eye. 375 of them I would never look at again, with 10 or 20 being any damn good. With film, I'm constantly asking myself "Why am I taking this picture? Is this worth expending one of my 36 shots on?" - and many a time, I find myself backing away from a mediocre picture without pulling the trigger.

 

Oh, and the last reason why film is superior (which is a bit of a cheat, since it doesn't apply anymore). One word: Kodachrome!

 

Day 201/365 - Seattle At Sunset

 

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post #75 of 120
1/15/11 at 7:50am
Well let's be fair here, you are comparing sooc digital (with whatever presets you chose) versus a negative that's been lab processed. Post a full size shot for editing and I bet a few here could whip up a version that's just as striking as the top one, I bet a minor tweak to contrast would do 90% of what you want.

I like film too but it's on life support.
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post #76 of 120
1/15/11 at 11:12am

Oh sure you could tweak the colors to match film, but you want to go color correct everything you shoot? I like to keep my photoshoppery to a minimum - it's my least favorite part of photography. And besides, nothing you do is going to recover the highlights - film overloads gracefully when there is washed out lighting while digital highlights abruptly clip and look horrible as soon as anything gets too bright. It's not so evident in the two pictures I posted above, but I've had some awesome shots turn out that would have killed the exposure on my digital.


As for the life support - sure it's a niche, but there's been an upswing in film usage as of late (weird anomalies like the end of Kodachrome developing aside). The Lomo hipster crowd has become pretty large and I hear tell of professionals coming back to shooting film. Sure it'll never be really big like it once was, but like records, film will probably never quite go completely away.

 

Or at the very least - if it is indeed a doomed medium, I'll be shooting it all the way up until there's no more rolls left to expose.

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post #77 of 120
1/15/11 at 5:53pm

Well again, it's not just tweaking to taste.  Raw files are like your negatives, you get to decide how your negatives are going to develop into prints.

 

If you let the lab decide for you then you LIKE the look of your lab more than you do the look of the film you are shooting, especially if you are pushing ISO or overexposing to begin with.

 

If you are shooting jpeg then you are stuck with the results of your jpeg presets and that doesnt accurately reflect even the capabilities of your camera let alone the true capabilities of digital photography.

 

If you choose a crappy jpeg preset for the type of work you are shooting then NO WONDER you like the lab prints better.  Even the best jpeg preset won't hold up to a well done raw conversion.

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post #78 of 120
1/15/11 at 6:15pm

30 seconds worth of contrast and saturation bumps.  Hope this is ok.  For the record, I like this one better than I do your film version but I'm multiple kinds of color blind, so ymmv.  =)

 

5358352473_08603ebc68_o.jpg

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post #79 of 120
1/16/11 at 6:09am

Nice example of what a little post processing can do, Sam. I agree completely with you regarding PP. I see digital as an opportunity to easily and inexpensively have my own "dark room", something I never had in the days of film.

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post #80 of 120
1/16/11 at 1:13pm


Quote:
Originally Posted by Scott Merryfield View Post

I see digital as an opportunity to easily and inexpensively have my own "dark room", something I never had in the days of film.


+1

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post #81 of 120
1/20/11 at 11:53am


Quote:
Originally Posted by Sam Posten View Post
If you choose a crappy jpeg preset for the type of work you are shooting then NO WONDER you like the lab prints better.  Even the best jpeg preset won't hold up to a well done raw conversion.


Actually that first digital one was a straight RAW shot, straight from the camera and converted via photoshop to JPG. The film one wasn't handled by the lab either, beyond basic developing - it was a straight scan from my Epson V500. Now there was probably some tweaking here and there as the settings interpreted the information one way or another - but that was me doing my level best to keep things Straight Out Of Camera.

 

Personally, I think the tweaked digital looks a little too fake (and that's not counting that it looks too clean, too . . . well, digital). The saturation looks too strong, it didn't look that powerful (not quite the right word, but it'll have to do) in real life.

 

And I thought of one other reason I prefer film? Permanence. Take a peek at this slideshow: http://www.time.com/time/audioslide/0,32187,1920419,00.html - slides from the great depression that look like they were shot yesterday. Can we honestly say that .jpg files will be a viable format in 75 years? Hell, will it still be viable in 20? Hard drive crashes? Remote Servers go down? Flicker goes out of business? Big deal - I still have the original negatives and slides sitting on my shelf. All it costs me is some work to rescan all my material.

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post #82 of 120
1/20/11 at 12:53pm

Even negatives are vulnerable, just ask the scores of 'togs who had their negatives stored in the safety deposit boxes of the WTC....  (not making light of the loss of life there, just that 'this too shall pass' is true of everything)

 

Anyway SOOC Raw files converted in photoshop are flat for a reason!

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/u-raw-files.shtml

 

Again on the fake versus reality pick your poison.  I personally think Kodachrome looks fake too, tooooo saturated.  But once you shoot on your film of choice that stock's characteristics are baked in and changing them requires serious darkroom attention.  If the shot I modified looks fake to you because of the choices I made then minor tweaks can tone that down.  But to gripe about the look of film versus digital by taking the least amount of personal direction possible on the two resulting images seems truly disingenuous..

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post #83 of 120
1/20/11 at 12:57pm

And what settings did you use for your digital shot? Just because it's digital doesn't mean it's automatic. If you're going to play with your settings on film, you need to do the same for digital.

 

My professional photographer buddy switched to digital years ago, and he tells me that if you know your equipment well, the differences become negligible. Of course, for him even the cheap cameras are 5 figures.

 

 

About those slides, just make slides from the digital images. They'll last. Problem solved. And if you are worried about losing the digital files, then you aren't taking proper backup precautions.

 

Unless you are keeping your negatives and slides in a fireproof/weatherproof safe, you are taking no more precaution against loss than someone who doesn't back up their hard drive.

 

And JPEG's been around quite awhile in technology terms. The group began in 1986, with first publication in 1992.  It's been an ISO/IEC standard since 1994. It's integrated into almost anything that views or edits image and video files. The odds of it becoming obsoleted into disappearing entirely anytime soon are slim. The media it's being stored on long-term is the bigger issue, but that's what backup transfers are for.

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post #84 of 120
1/21/11 at 1:03pm

Well, the bank vaults of the World Trade Center is kind of strawmanish.  No media - analog, digital or cruciforms carved onto a stone tablet -  is going to survive a catastrophic failure of bilibilcal proportions like that. And of course if you go far enough out, eventually all matter will succumb to the ravages of time. Entropy always wins in the end. But if I take a box of slides and CD and leave them on the same shelf for a hundred years, the slides will be viewable. The CD will probably have fallen prey to CD rot and faded dyes (and that's not considering if we'll even have CD drives by then and if we'd even have the right file format to read them).

 

Case in point, recently I've been scanning a whole bunch of old film for my mom that was shot back in the 40's and 50's - and despite them sitting untouched and forgotten in the damp, dusty basement under less than ideal conditions for some 60 years, the photos still look pretty good. Somehow I have doubts that a box of CDs, stored under the same conditions, would anything close to resembling usable in 2074.

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post #85 of 120
1/21/11 at 1:27pm

I'm talking about a "common" house fire, not worldwide catastrophe. When the big one hits, old photos will be the least of our worries.

 

The trick against obsolescence of media is to always maintain a live, stable backup. For the time being that means redundant magnetic hard drives, one backup at home for quick archiving, and another offsite as a failsafe.  There was a discussion about just this issue on slashdot yesterday.

 

But failing to protect slides and negatives by just leaving them on the shelf is just as bad as a single hard drive failure with no backup. No, it's worse, because floods or fire will cause permanent unrecoverable damage, but you can recover data from all but the most physically damaged drives for under $1000 if it's worth that much to you. Heck, NASA was able to salvage hard drives from Columbia.

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post #86 of 120
1/21/11 at 7:24pm

John, I feel your pain.

I used to use a Nikon F2, back in the 70s. I've had a lot of photography courses in school, along with a lot of darkroom work. I miss using a darkroom. I miss the smell of the chemicals, and all the different processes you could use, for whatever effect you were trying for. My major in school was photography. The instructor and I had a falling out. I quit school, and was out over a year, with two quarters left to go. I went back to finish, and while I was gone the school dropped photography as a major. I finished with my degree in commercial art. After school, I did portraits for about a year, using a 70mm camera. It got so boring, I couldn't stand it anymore.

 

Not staying in photography for all these years, I've forgotten most of what I knew of the technical stuff. So, when I bought my new Nikon digital SLR, I found out that I'm kinda lost. Digital is a good bit different, even though a lot has stayed the same (as was mentioned before about lighting and such). One aspect I like is that you don't waste a lot of film anymore, with bad shots taken, Just delete from camera, and keep on shooting. So, I'm taking a night time digital photography class at the local community college, starting Monday night. I'm hoping to refresh what I knew, and learn a lot of new stuff about digital. My wife has been a graphic artist for 30+ years, so she has used Photoshop and other programs (Illustrator, InDesign, etc.) for that long, or since they came out, whichever came first. She's very good with Photoshop. So, when I need help in the digital darkroom, I'm covered there. I saw a whole darkroom setup for sale on Craig's List the other day. If I had somewhere to set it up, I'd have bought it. Our bathroom is too small.

 

Kodak has killed Kodachrome film now. I don't know how much longer you'll be able to buy B&W film either. I don't know for sure, but I'd say the chemicals are probably getting harder to come by too. Is photo paper still plentiful?

I hope you find a way to make digital more fun for yourself.

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post #87 of 120
4/29/11 at 9:59pm
Stumbled across this thread and skimmed the first couple posts (from 2006). Tell you this: Kodak here in Rochester deeply wishes there had been no transition to digital. Caught them flatfooted and they've never recovered.


Digital without a doubt is the best thing to have happened for the family and enthusiasts, like me, my wife, my mom. My wife takes far more photos, far more affordable. And she's reviewing them within hours, not days. and I'm taking all sorts of trivial snapshots now that my phone has a capable camera.


As for photos longevity: thus a concern. I don't miss losing 1 in 10 rolls of film to airport X-ray machines. But now I gave to worry about hard drive crashes. Prints no longer glue themselves together, but I nonlonger gave prints. And I've just found a bunch of slides, 10 - 40 yrs old; a fifth are faded beyond recovery, but most are still there about to be sent out for digital scanning. Will my digital photos be findable, viewable in 40 years?
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post #88 of 120
4/30/11 at 2:38pm


 

Quote:
Originally Posted by DaveF View Post

Digital without a doubt is the best thing to have happened for the family and enthusiasts, like me, my wife, my mom. My wife takes far more photos, far more affordable. And she's reviewing them within hours, not days. and I'm taking all sorts of trivial snapshots now that my phone has a capable camera.


 

The problem I've found with the sharp uptick of photos and the ability to fire off a hundred without batting an eye is the signal to noise ratio goes WAY up. Take this example - just this yesterday, I was in a View and Comment on My Photostream group over on flicker, commenting on someone who had something of upwards of 10K photos (no, really). If it drifted in front of her lens, she shot it and posted it straight away.60% of it was mediocre, 30% was just crap and 6% (and that's being generous) was pretty good and the remaining 4% was actually legitimately good photography. But after slogging through a hundred baby photos (more or less the same photo, just from a slightly different angle or zoom), I was numb to the good stuff. I had just given up caring by that point and my comments were pretty generic "nice shot" or "Looks like you had fun" so I could get the hell outta there.

 

When you have a hundred pictures where one would do, people are less likely to look at any of them.

 

Another aspect of constantly shooting and shooting is that - well, you take a picture to capture a memory, but if you spend all your time taking the picture, you aren't really there. When I was in Paris a couple years ago, touring the Louvre, I of course stopped to see the Mona Lisa - the 800 pound gorilla of the exhibit. It's on the far side of a room a couple hundred feet long, filled with a hundred people packed in like sardines. Every single one of them - to the man - didn't bother to actually LOOK at the painting, they were all too busy getting a picture of the painting to actually enjoy it. They'd crane their necks, snap a picture, chimp a little bit, snap another one and then scurry on to their next destination.

After that visit, I noticed it everywhere in Paris - shoot, chimp, move on. It was actually kind of eye opening.

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post #89 of 120
4/30/11 at 6:42pm

I couldn't believe the thousands of photos one guy on a social networking site (initials F and B) took on at a 3-day weekend convention recently.  Not only did he boast that he took 10,000 photos (mostly in rapid-fire mode) that weekend, but it looks like he also posted most of them, and we're talking 30+ photos within a minute window.  It didn't matter if the photos were out-of-focused or not color corrected, or cropped properly, if people he knew were in the shot, he was posting it.  It was both creepy and ridiculous.   I know I take and post a lot of photos, but I try to keep it within 2-4 photos of a similar pose/situation (not 200), and then move on.  I also try to keep the number of photos uploaded down with selective editing of the digital mountain of photos so as to not do what the other guy does.    But I know I still post too many photos, but I'm actively trying to improve in the editing stage.  This coming from a guy with almost 32,000 photos in his Flickr photostream...

 

 

 

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post #90 of 120
4/30/11 at 7:19pm


Well, let's be honest.. one of the best things about analog photos is that they had a real world cost, so people didn't take a bunch of BS crap photos of nothing - they took what they were doing a lot more seriously.  An artist can make any medium look good because they put in the effort.   What you have in your example is where making something cheap and easy just entices it to be abused.. hey, can I talk to you about the new $99 HTIB at Walmart? 

Quote:
Originally Posted by Patrick Sun View Post

I couldn't believe the thousands of photos one guy on a social networking site (initials F and B) took on at a 3-day weekend convention recently.  Not only did he boast that he took 10,000 photos (mostly in rapid-fire mode) that weekend, but it looks like he also posted most of them, and we're talking 30+ photos within a minute window.  It didn't matter if the photos were out-of-focused or not color corrected, or cropped properly, if people he knew were in the shot, he was posting it.  It was both creepy and ridiculous.   I know I take and post a lot of photos, but I try to keep it within 2-4 photos of a similar pose/situation (not 200), and then move on.  I also try to keep the number of photos uploaded down with selective editing of the digital mountain of photos so as to not do what the other guy does.    But I know I still post too many photos, but I'm actively trying to improve in the editing stage.  This coming from a guy with almost 32,000 photos in his Flickr photostream...

 

 

 



 

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