I have a few film cameras left, which I tend to use to shoot infrared or 120 film. I have a Yashica dual-lens that’s older than I am. I also have a polaroid camera that Instax makes a film for. It’s fun to hand out the pictures to friends or just see what effects can do with the film.
I don’t use those things, actually- I try to get exactly what I want when I shoot. Silly, I know, but although I do shoot some digital I’m not 100% on the digital-manipulation bandwagon- just not comfortable enough, I guess.
No worries! 
This is what photographers generally aim for. That said, if you remember the wet darkroom, you remember that images were not generally printed straight. Contrast adjustment, dodging, and burning were part of the day-to-day arsenal of printers. Ansel Adams’s photos, for instance, were certainly not what you would call “straight from camera.” Take, for example, his famous moonrise photo. This is the contact print. And this is the final print. There a lot of darkroom work going on there.
And the digital darkroom is analogous. Since I come from a photojournalistic background, I don’t really like changing the essential “truth” of the image. But what film or a sensor records is different than what the eyes sees. I believe almost every image benefits from some localized adjustments (dodging and burning) in order to better communicate the reality of seeing. Now, for general purpose work, like if I want to churn out 1000 images, I might skip that step. But if I want to make the best print possible from a given digital negative, there is almost always going to be some dodging and burning going on.
I pulled myself kicking and screaming into the digital age some three years ago, when I got my first digital SLR. It’s a pretty big hunk of plastic and magnesium, and it’s my primary camera. But it’s just too big and obtrusive for street photography, and sometimes it’s a hassle to lug around. That’s when I reach up on the shelf for one of the smallest and sexiest pieces of photography-related engineering that ever came out of Japan: My Nikon FE2. I love the minimalist feel, the minuscule size and the “click” sound it makes when I press the shutter button.
If you add up the cost of hard disk space, backups, image processing computer and software and the generation life of your average digital camera body, film ain’t that expensive. Yeah, and the archival security thing. I’ve already had one hard disk crash and had to recover my digital photo collection from the off-site backup. That was no fun at all, especially before I had verified that the restore was fully functional. Now I try to shoot at least a few pictures of important events on film.
ETA: And I still haven’t been able to simulate digitally the tonalities and the texture of Tri-X.
Photoshop was the clincher for me. I shoot primarily landscapes in black and white and
say I shoot all day and still don’t get the lighting I want, or didn’t quite calculate right and the tones I was going for didn’t come out as planned. I still love the images but something is just off. All I have to do is adjust a few levels and everything comes out perfectly.
I still respect film and will from time to time shoot a roll, I feel I would be more apt to using film more often if I had access to a darkroom where I could develop my own film and prints. It’s not that I don’t support film developers, I just don’t trust them :smack:
No kidding.
No argument here, either. But I don’t really like digitally simulating grain, in general.
Me neither. But I had to try :smack:
PM me if you find the disks. I have the reader around here somewhere…
You don’t “have to” back up digital photos, you “get to”. Digital allows you the ability to have immediate access to all of your photos and essentially have them perfectly protected. You can easily back up a hundred thousand photos by sticking a couple HDs in a safe deposit box, have them stored in the cloud on the internet, or by burning blurays. None of these is going to cost more than a few hundred dollars, and all are essentially foolproof. Compare that with film. What’s the cost of copying 100,000 negatives? I have no idea, but I would imagine it would be enormous. Then, you still only have two copies extant, compared with numerous in digital.
Your wedding photos is a good example. What would you tell the people who lost their negatives in a fire, spilled something on them, or just plain lost them? They are essentially SOL. Certainly replacing them wouldn’t be as easy as just burning another DVD and sending it off. The problem with digital storage isn’t it’s inherent reliability, it’s the inability of people to properly backup stuff.
This was at the college paper I worked at, circa 1994-1998. About half the SyQuest cartridges we had written to in 1994 or 95 were already unreadable two years later. I would hope this is an anomaly, but I can’t explain why something like four of our eight or so disks went FUBAR.
No, you “have to”. One fine morning, for no apparent reason, your computer is dead. And since you didn’t “have to” back up, you’re SOL. Or your teenaged boy has downloaded a trojan which f*cks up all your JPEGs, and you didn’t discover that until after you did your last backup, so your backup is screwed, too. Usually, you’ll be able to see and hopefully, at least to a certain degree, stop whatever it is that destroys your negatives. They don’t disappear suddenly and without previous notice.
And in fifty years, your ancestors probably won’t be able to read the digital media containing your pictures. If I find my father’s old negatives stashed away in the basement, I can read those images without any problems.
Different standards. You aren’t leafing through your negatives every day exposing them to wear and tear. Besides, very rarely does your computer die due to the harddrive. And if it does, very rarely is it because the data is actually gone, it’s because the motor is out. Admittedly it costs money, but you are pretty much guaranteed to get the data off the drive. Events that actually destroy the data on a disk are extremely rare.
Unless there’s a fire, or they fall off the moving truck, or someone spills something on them, or any of a million other things happen.
Everything today will be easily read in 50 years. You’d have to up that by a factor of 10 before I’d worry about not being able to read them. And what sort of condition are your father’s negatives going to be in after 50 years in the basement?
Besides, the point I’m making is that it isn’t what idiots do. Idiots are the ones without proper backup, and yes, the data is vulnerable in those cases. That’s no different from film. What is different from film is that with digital, I can get virtually risk proof back up for little money.
History doesn’t support that claim. I’ve got some 20 year old 5 1/4" floppies where I stored my Master’s thesis. I can’t read them “easily”. Even if I could, I’m not convinced that the software I’ve installed on my current computer can decipher the bytes into something legible. I’ve also got a couple of backup tape cartridges from the early 90s. I can’t read those at all. And the backup format on those tapes is definitely obsolete.
ETA: And don’t get me started on the physical longevity of storage media. The guaranteed lifespan of a CD or DVD is not measured in multiple decades.
With reasonable care DVDs and CDs easily reach into multiple decades (I have several examples myself). What I assume is happening is that you are again using different standards. A printed DVD stored in a suitable environment is going to easily last decades. It is true that if you handle them regularly they may get scratched, but if you do the same with a negative it can get smudged, bent, torn, etc.
As for 5 1/4" you can get the drives for less than $30 on ebay. If the worse thing you have to do is to make a perfect digital copy of your photos every 20 years, well, I’d say that’s a successful backup system.
With a smudged, bent, torn, etc., neg, a good amount of data is still recoverable. A scratched DVD and you’re pretty much screwed. I’ve had reasonable luck with DVDs, but I have CDs from 10-15 years ago that were merely sitting in a sleeve in a carrying case that no longer work. And those 5 1/4 inch disks from the 80s? My cousin has a C64 and we tried maybe 10 years ago reading those disks. About a third no longer worked.
If you care about your data, you need to make it redundant now–although I don’t think you’re necessarily arguing against that. I had an iOmega 1TB RAID 5 drive in my early back-up days. The sucker bit the dust within 6 months. Now, maybe you’re right–maybe it’s just a motor or other hardware issue–I don’t know. But I don’t trust it. Luckily, I had everything additionally redundant. I’ve heard too many horror stories of photographers losing the only copies of their data because they trusted their hard drives. I personally have only had one drive fail on me, but my luck with removable media is much worse. Three Zip Disks destroyed by the click of death (why I trusted iOmega with the teradrive, I don’t know. I’m an idiot.) Four SyQuest cartridges that were just sitting in a storage locker–unreadable. I’m sure a data recovery expert can dig out some info for thousands of dollars, but why, when I should always just be duplicating my data?
Right, the advantage of digital is redundancy and it’s weakness is requiring a bit more effort. You’ve heard the horror stories of losing copies of data, but surely you’ve heard the same stories with fires or physically losing negatives. With minimal effort and cost you can set up a system that is essentially risk free, and provides access to all of your photos 24/7. That isn’t possible with film.
Fires destroying negs are far, far rarer than hard drive failure. At least, I can’t think of a single person who lost their negs to a fire. I don’t think I know a single person who hasn’t had a drive or disk corrupted at some point. As for physically losing negs, I think it’s just as easy as losing a DVD or a hard drive.
Not as easily (you can always digitize your film, if you want, and that is what I’m currently doing just to have easier access to that part of my archive), but I do feel a film negative persists with less effort than a digital copy. I guess it depends on what perspective you’re coming from.
Every time I dig up my old negatives or slides I find one or two that have been destroyed by water damage, or being stuck together by moisture. Granted, the vast majority are in great shape and I could strike prints today from them that would be in perfect condition.
I have every digital photo I’ve ever shot (tens of thousands) available to me on a few hard drives and on DVDs. (I need to buy a new terabyte drive real soon now)
Neither method is foolproof, neither method is awful. I fully expect to have access to all my digital photos longer than I keep my negatives, if only for the much easier access and the fact that they take up no space.
Don’t get me wrong–all things considered, I do prefer keeping the archive stored digitally, but anything important I will make sure to make a few prints of. I just feel that, in the long run, it’s easier to put away a negative, forget about it, and come back to it in 50 years or so and still have something you can access. Like I said, I can go through negs stored in a shoebox from the 60s and 70s and have something easily printable. (Hell, I could go back to the dawn of photography and be able to access that information with little effort). Can I do the same thing with computer data from that same era?