I find this video amusing in that it pretends that analog photography is somehow an ancient technique that is being re-invented by a new generation. The instant gratification of digital imaging seems to cloud over the reality that practical digital imaging as we know it today is barely ten years old. I developed my first roll of film, and printed it out in a darkroom in 1985. My negatives from those days are still in my files and prints, while most digital images made fifteen years later in 2000 are now unreadable jumbles of ones and zeros on a corrupt floppy disk in a drawer somewhere. Analog photographers’ don’t need a faux computer voiceover to validate their work in film. It will be here when you, I, and everyone we know, are gone. And that, I find, is what keeps me from switching from a medium which is an artistic step towards immortality, and will speak to people centuries hence.
I think, though, that if you go back to the early years of photography, a lot of that work was lost because no one knew how to preserve it.
I, too, have negatives dating back to the 1970s that are still usable. But I have also taken care of my digital images (dating back to 1994), migrating them through different storage devices (floppy to Zip to CD to mirrored eSATA drives).
Some of us have everything we ever shot, some of us can’t find yesterday’s shoot. It’s those who don’t understand and protect that will have issues.
I find this video amusing in that it pretends that analog photography is somehow an ancient technique that is being re-invented by a new generation. The instant gratification of digital imaging seems to cloud over the reality that practical digital imaging as we know it today is barely ten years old. I developed my first roll of film, and printed it out in a darkroom in 1985. My negatives from those days are still in my files and prints, while most digital images made fifteen years later in 2000 are now unreadable jumbles of ones and zeros on a corrupt floppy disk in a drawer somewhere. Analog photographers’ don’t need a faux computer voiceover to validate their work in film. It will be here when you, I, and everyone we know, are gone. And that, I find, is what keeps me from switching from a medium which is an artistic step towards immortality, and will speak to people centuries hence.
I think, though, that if you go back to the early years of photography, a lot of that work was lost because no one knew how to preserve it.
I, too, have negatives dating back to the 1970s that are still usable. But I have also taken care of my digital images (dating back to 1994), migrating them through different storage devices (floppy to Zip to CD to mirrored eSATA drives).
Some of us have everything we ever shot, some of us can’t find yesterday’s shoot. It’s those who don’t understand and protect that will have issues.