View Full Version : Has digital.... ???
sc_rufctr
10-04-2010, 18:05
Has digital RUINED photography for the average person?
That might sound like a stupid question but if you think about what is happening out there it may not be so stupid.
To explain my question further let me ask you another question...
How many people have decent film cameras and lenses stored away in a closet or an attic that is no longer being used?
We all know these same people would now be using a digital camera. The problem is the newish digital cameras they are using would at best be described as a point and shoot.
So when you break it down there are literally millions of really decent cameras and lenses being stored away never to be used again!
Replaced by what? Pretty ordinary photos generated by pretty ordinary hardware that becomes redundant and out dated almost as soon as it hits the shelves of the camera shop.
These same cameras have tiny fixed lenses with heaps of built in distortion. They just can’t be compared to a good SLR or M mount lens.
The reason all of this has happened is because people love the convenience and economics of digital. Also, most mobile phones now having a very sub standard camera built in.
These images are even more “ordinary”… The new interchangeable lens digital cameras are great but most average users go for a cheap fixed lens point and shoot! (sub $200)
And lastly… How are these images being stored? On external hard drives that are basically a ticking time bomb.
How many images have already been lost because of hardware failures?
I work in the IT support industry and I know for a fact that most people don’t have a proper back up schedule or routine in place.
They use the fingers crossed approach mostly.
Have you ever seen an adult cry after losing a few gigabytes of data? I have and it’s not pretty.
My mother bought a Konica C35 in the mid seventies. She traveled to Europe and everywhere she went she had her camera with her.
She still has the color and B&W photos from this trip stored away in her precious photo albums. Sure the color images aren’t what they used to be but she had the good sense to store her negatives properly so most are still usable.
The B&W are still perfect… Extraordinary when you think about it.
I wonder how many people using their cheap digital cameras today will be able to view their images in 40 years time. Not many I bet. Maybe the convenience and economics of digital has a very real hidden cost.
And lastly… How are these images being stored? On external hard drives that are basically a ticking time bomb.
External? Most people I know (excluding people with some data/media collecting mania) don't own an external drive, or only own one because the internal is too small or already broken. What with Windows and Mac placing the home directory of the user on the system (internal) drive by default, pictures will usually be on the internal drive, to be scrapped along with the computer as that fails, and at the very best burned to an assortment of CDs and DVDs in mixed state of decay and labelling.
The culture of photography has changed more so.
Here is a point to think about: Point and shoots which as you say your average person uses have a very slow auto focus speed. Now beacuse of this people can't effectively take action shots, so they no longer try. So now the skill and intuition involved in photography which even the average person had once upon a time has diminished as they don't need to know anything. So what has happened is that all their photos have become so mundane as they keep taking shots of "interesting objects" from boring angles and their friends, all huddled in the middle of the frame awkwardly smiling at the camera and all the tonality destroyed by the flash.
Rant over.
sc_rufctr
10-05-2010, 03:02
The culture of photography has changed more so...
So now the skill and intuition involved in photography which even the average person had once upon a time has diminished as they don't need to know anything...
Rant over.
Excellent point.
One good thing that is happening right now... The resurgence of film. I feel joy when I meet a young person shooting film.
And people say film is dead. When I hear that I can't help but laugh. :D
As it happens. My hard drive died about 6 weeks ago and although I have an external one and Trueimage to back up with, my last backup was early April. Lost everything I'd done for the last four months. I get your point. Agree with you and my favoured media is film.
sc_rufctr
10-05-2010, 04:20
muf (I work in the IT support industry)
If it makes you feel any better one of the first things they taught us was... Once you start using a computer it's only a matter of time before you loose data.
It could have been much worse. Well done for having a backup hard drive.
It is just a perception that we have so many "ordinary" photos today. We've had "ordinary" photos from ordinary people ever since!
One thing that's feeding the perception is the Internet. Because of the internet, you can see not only your mom's, your aunt's, your friends' ordinary photos, you can see anyone's ordinary photo! Add that to the rising number of people that can afford digital cameras and you have a whole lot more ordinary people with ordinary photos.
Do you expect ordinary people to even care about distortion, M lenses, CA, corner falloff etc?
Ordinary people with ordinary digital cameras didn't destroy photography.
It's the pros/purists/traditionalist/serious hobbyists who keep on complaining about the death of photography when it should be their responsibility to keep it alive.
Morca007
10-05-2010, 05:57
People with an axe to grind over the long and storied tradition of photographic record have very short memories.
sc_rufctr
10-05-2010, 07:14
I'm not grinding any axe. I just hope people realize how vulnerable their digital images are if not stored securely and backed up.
This is interesting...
http://www.switched.com/2010/09/30/kodak-porta-400-film-made-exclusively-for-scanning-not-printi/?icid=main|aim|dl5|sec3_lnk3|174486 (http://www.switched.com/2010/09/30/kodak-porta-400-film-made-exclusively-for-scanning-not-printi/?icid=main%7Caim%7Cdl5%7Csec3_lnk3%7C174486)
Quote from this link posted earlier... http://www.vividlight.com/articles/1513.htm
Cost
The big plug for digital has been cost savings. "Of course $4,000 for a digital camera and $25,000 dollars for a digital camera back sound like a lot of money. But look at the cost savings in film and processing and you'll see that in the long run the digital system more than pays for itself."
The truth is the cost savings take place in the short run. The long run is over the next ten to fifteen years and involves the storage and retrieval of those images. CD-RW and CD-R disks are used by many photographers for the cataloging and backup of their digital images. CD-RW disks have a projected life of around 5 years, Some CD-R disks claim that your data is safe for up to 50 years.
The problem is these formats will eventually become obsolete. Before they do you'll have to come up with a way to transfer all of that data to a new format. That may be DVD or some other format that we don't know about yet. But what we do know is if you have a large number of archival disks it will take a lot of time and labor to transfer the images. Time and labor means money. If you plan on keeping those images for a long period of time you can count on performing this process several times. Suddenly digital doesn't look so cheap - or easy
Andy Kibber
10-05-2010, 07:28
The culture of photography has changed more so.
Here is a point to think about: Point and shoots which as you say your average person uses have a very slow auto focus speed.
Compared to what? Manual focus cameras? Auto focus film P&S? Autofocus SLRs and DSLRs?
Now beacuse of this people can't effectively take action shots, so they no longer try. So now the skill and intuition involved in photography which even the average person had once upon a time has diminished as they don't need to know anything. So what has happened is that all their photos have become so mundane as they keep taking shots of "interesting objects" from boring angles and their friends, all huddled in the middle of the frame awkwardly smiling at the camera and all the tonality destroyed by the flash.
Rant over.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Take a gander at old shoeboxes of photos at yardsales, flea markets, etc. The ratio of decent photos to crappy ones is more the same than ever.
sc_rufctr
10-05-2010, 08:04
Compared to what? Manual focus cameras? Auto focus film P&S? Autofocus SLRs and DSLRs?...
I think he meant auto focus DSLRs.
... I have no idea what you're talking about. Take a gander at old shoeboxes of photos at yardsales, flea markets, etc. The ratio of decent photos to crappy ones is more the same than ever.
That may be true but those photos still exist and they meant something to someone regardless of how "crappy" they may be.
Nikon Bob
10-05-2010, 08:51
I don't think there are any more crappy/ordinary photos, percentage wise. today than before. As someone else has pointed out, we merely now have access to more on the net. Those shoe boxes full of photos did mean something to the original photographers but are now valueless, being in a yard sale, to the offspring of the original photographers. In the long run it really does not matter so long as they last roughly the life of the original photographer.
Bob
Format obsolescence shouldn't be a problem. Sooner or later someone will start to offer service converting ancient .jpg files to current format. That is, if people will still have their ancient .jpg files!
Here comes another assumption - on long run will survive .jpg's stored in personal waults at data centers. That is, pictures of people who will be ready to pay subscription in hope DC's will still be running when their granchildren will be interested in pictures made by grandparents.
Andy Kibber
10-05-2010, 10:20
That may be true but those photos still exist and they meant something to someone regardless of how "crappy" they may be.
Absolutely. I don't see what that has to do with Neare's comment or this thread though.
The truth is the cost savings take place in the short run. The long run is over the next ten to fifteen years and involves the storage and retrieval of those images. CD-RW and CD-R disks are used by many photographers for the cataloging and backup of their digital images. CD-RW disks have a projected life of around 5 years, Some CD-R disks claim that your data is safe for up to 50 years.
The problem is these formats will eventually become obsolete. Before they do you'll have to come up with a way to transfer all of that data to a new format. That may be DVD or some other format that we don't know about yet. But what we do know is if you have a large number of archival disks it will take a lot of time and labor to transfer the images. Time and labor means money. If you plan on keeping those images for a long period of time you can count on performing this process several times. Suddenly digital doesn't look so cheap - or easy
I don't think we should limit ourselves to CD's, DVD's and hard disks as the only means of preserving digital images.
We have online photo albums where we can store digital images and as ridiculous as it may sound, I do believe they can last a hundred years there.
IT infrastructure and planning is a lot more reliable as anyone could think.
shadowfox
10-05-2010, 11:57
Has digital RUINED photography for the average person?
My answer: No.
The things that ruined photography for the average person are the same ones before digital arrived:
1. Lack of realization that you have to master the basics before you can take decent pictures consistently.
2. Lack of patience to let your vision and standard grow naturally (different rate for each of us, but we will get better).
3. The thought that if only I have that camera, I'd be producing masterpieces, automagically.
4. GAS, an important ingredient for becoming a camera collector, but may have adverse effects on your goal to be a good photographer.
It has nothing to do with digital or film.
Now, if your question was:
Has digital ruined people's chance to discover film as a different and unique way to pursue photography?
Then my answer is a big
YES !!!!!!!!
... and that vexed me to no end.
We have online photo albums where we can store digital images and as ridiculous as it may sound, I do believe they can last a hundred years there.
IT infrastructure and planning is a lot more reliable as anyone could think.
Online file storage infrastructure needs to be renewed from time to time, it also needs a lot of energy. It's fine while people pay for it. I mean, if someone will get tired paying for it after 10 years, where will go that pictures? I guess they will be just deleted, forever unless mighty Google will not secretively buy such orphaned pictures in bulk for peanuts before deletion from online photo sharing services.
In a word - are you ready to pay for company which will keep your pictures available? If you want your kids and grandkids looking at your digital pictures, be prepared to pay until end of your days. I'm not saying this is particularly bad, it's just fact - you can't store media in basement and hope 30-50 years later someone will just plug it in and go through pictures.
"Of course $4,000 for a digital camera and $25,000 dollars for a digital camera back sound like a lot of money. But look at the cost savings in film and processing and you'll see that in the long run the digital system more than pays for itself."
O.o whoever wrote that article...
That $25,000 has to be upgraded a year after you buy it. :)
That is a lot of rolls of film.
Andy, that is why I was saying that it is the culture of photography that has changed, not the taking good photo's part. Peoples approach to taking photo's has changed now that they don't have a disposable limited to 27 shots. I think it would be safe to assume that people take a lot more crappy photo's nowadays, but they just delete them. ;)
Online file storage infrastructure needs to be renewed from time to time,
Well, the renewal of infrastructure can maintain data - I recently found an old university home page of mine from seventeen years ago which still is being served (but has lost all links to and from the outside world).
But that is a rare exception - most digitally published work I've done in the past 30 years has vanished from public storage, even from libraries. Indeed even the TV features I've done this year have already vanished, thanks to political lobbying by German private TV stations that forced public TV to stop all public access to their archives.
And I am talking high profile publications there. When it comes to users putting their data on online file space, it will predictably remain there even shorter - all the online file storage I've used for more than two years ended either effectively illegalized (peer-to-peer networks), changed the file sharing system to the effect of rendering my old data inaccessible (my ISP going "no media file types due to copyright concerns"), changed to expensive subscriber "premium" services (just about every friggin' photo sharing site that did not lock out pros), limited picture size at a value useless for professional distribution (every friggin' free photo sharing site), or went just plain broke (and presumably sold the disks holding my copyrighted data to some surplus store).
Sevo
tom.w.bn
10-06-2010, 12:05
See what I mean?
No Sir....
tom.w.bn
10-06-2010, 12:06
Once again so many false assumptions when talking about the ole times. The biggest one is that high quality film cameras are replaced by cheap p/s digital cameras.
True is: The average Jane/John Doe had a film p/s camera and exchanged it with a digital p/s camera. So there is no loss here. Many years ago the average print quality of normal photo prints was really bad. Nowadays an average digital print has a much better quality. So the vast majority of average snappers have a huge benefit from digital cameras regarding photo quality.
You make such a fuss about lost digital files. Yes, many will be lost, but do you really think that the majority of snappers care about lost digital photos? That's absolutely not proven. Perhaps I only know exceptional snappers but they still make prints of the most important photos and tape them in an album like in the ole days. If the digital photos would get lost, the average snappers I know wouldn't care.
My conclusion is that for the majority of photographers digital is a huge benefit regarding quality. This may not be true for more ambitious photographers or people visiting RFF.
Has digital RUINED photography for the average person?
.
No. Digital has brought photography to the average person. It has freed them from worrying if there is film in the camera (since they used it during the last holiday / occasion). Cell phones and point and shoots have given photography to the masses. Photography has exploded since the introduction of digital cameras (good or bad).
Steve
What you mean is not photography. It is digital moment capture with toy and fun products.
If we don't start to differentiate between a craft (art) and a brainless and hassle free (really?) capturing for fun, family or events, digital actually ruined photography.
I will give you that the explosion is snapshots but photography none the less. There is a fine line (very fine) between craft and brainless (your word) picture taking. Yes there are millions of pictures taken each year that mean nothing to most of the world but mean something to the taker and family and/or friends.
How has digital ruined photography? By letting 'the masses' take shots that have meaning to them?
I really think the bigger issue is posting them to flickr or social media. People have little editing skills and post millions of pictures and most are not good (composition, exposure, focus). That issue all over the place - flickr, social media and photo sites.
Steve
tom.w.bn
10-08-2010, 08:56
That's the point.
What about sticking to the term 'photography' for the meaning of the traditional craft and use the term 'shots' for digital mass images? That would be something I could live with :D
I have a better Idea. What you do is "art", what I do is "photography". That would be something I could live with.
Stuart John
10-08-2010, 10:30
Well as with everthing there are good and bad points that digital has given to photography. For alot of people digital has given them the control over their images especialy color that in the past was only enjoyed by the few. Digital has enabled us to alter images, restore old images and do many things that were very difficult in the tradtional darkroom and impossible to do with standard machine printing.
On the other hand digital has made us slaves to the computer. Most of us won't even consider taking our digital files straight from the camera and giving the JPG files to a lab for printing. Today we want to color correct everything before we even send it to the lab.
Constant software upgrades. When we buy a new digital body we find that our new RAW files won't open with our old software. We then find that the new software just won't run properly on our old computer either because our new RAW files are much bigger or the new software just got more bloated and requires a faster processor.
A B&W darkroom is rather simple, an enlarger won't crash and take all you images with it. The simple enlarger is easily fixed. Even when you change from an old F2 or M3 to a modern R9 or F6 that old enlager will still work and allow you to print your negs. It does not need a software upgrade and then slow down to the point of being unusable. The B&W enlarging paper looks great in any light and it does not suffer from bronzing either.
There are many other pros and cons and at the moment we are lucky to be able to enjoy both film and digital photography.
Online file storage infrastructure needs to be renewed from time to time, it also needs a lot of energy. It's fine while people pay for it. I mean, if someone will get tired paying for it after 10 years, where will go that pictures? I guess they will be just deleted, forever unless mighty Google will not secretively buy such orphaned pictures in bulk for peanuts before deletion from online photo sharing services.
Yes they'd need to be renewed but as long as digital images are made up of 1's and 0's, it wouldn't be difficult nor expensive to do that.
From a business perspective, it's a good idea to buy a closing online photo album. You not only have instant clients, but you also have what you need for social engineering. I bet that would be the trend later on for these online photo albums. The business prospect alone makes them reliable enough as long as we have capitalists.
In a word - are you ready to pay for company which will keep your pictures available? If you want your kids and grandkids looking at your digital pictures, be prepared to pay until end of your days. I'm not saying this is particularly bad, it's just fact - you can't store media in basement and hope 30-50 years later someone will just plug it in and go through pictures.
People have already been paying for albums for all their life since the invention of the camera. Plus, I think $24 a year is cheaper than all those photo albums and you don't need to worry about misplacing them or the space they take up. Just remember your password though...:D
In the next 30-50 years, we'll have a different version of that "stumbling across the basement to find 50 yr old photos" scenario.
In the next 30-50 years, we'll have something like "I typed my grandpa's name on Flickr and I saw all his photos!" scenario:)
Nikon Bob
10-09-2010, 07:52
What you mean is not photography. It is digital moment capture with toy and fun products.
If we don't start to differentiate between a craft (art) and a brainless and hassle free (really?) capturing for fun, family or events, digital actually ruined photography.
Nothing like artists wringing their hands in angst simply because the peasants are having some fun in the same playground. There is room for all of it in photography and there certainly are distinctions, always have been, between different forms of it.
Bob
Brian Sweeney
10-09-2010, 08:12
Anyone making a photograph is engaged in photography. Whether it is a 116 Box camera, Kodak Easyshare camera, or Leica M9ti. It is a wide-spectrum term.
All I can say is this is sure a boring thread. Here's is a film photograph followed by a digital one, both of which I like, which is just as irrelevant to the real world as else anything else in this thread — and that, I suppose, makes my post here relevant; but televant to what? Actually, I just asked myself why I'm posting this — and all I can think of is that it's in penance for reading this whole thread...
Bangkok | Leica M6 | Summilux-50 pre-ASPH | Tri-X at ISO 1000 (?)
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/242/535777179_3716286132_o.jpg
Bangkok | Ricoh GXR/A12 | 50mm EFOV | ISO 800 | f/8.0 | 1/1000 sec
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4013/4293365875_8de86acfb9_o.jpg
—Mitch/Paris
Scratching the Surface (http://www.flickr.com/photos/malland/3288123582/in/set-72157621142420186/lightbox/)
Digital is more convenient for sure but convenient for what exactly? Convenient that you can shoot many more pictures. Well, depending on how good you are and how good the equipment is, then you could just end up with more poors shots. That leads me on to whether it's more convenient in that you only have to print what's good. But then, if there are more poor shots then you will be more likely to store them on your HDD and not print them off at all. Now that brings me on the the lower amount of printing going on. I notice that many of the printing outlets appear to have less customers. Is this due to people printing at home and not printing at all? I think so! The death of many of the photographic processing firms is not far away in my opinion. Digital sure as hell hasn't given them more work and is probably the reason why most still process film. 10 years ago, you'd go to have your photo's developed and the shop would be chocca full. Nowadays your lucky if there are 2 or 3 people in there.
Paul
sc_rufctr
10-10-2010, 09:46
The relevance is that the film image you posted will still be viewable in 40 years time. (Making some assumptions about proper storage).
Will the digital still be around in 40 years? Who knows? Does it even matter? :confused:
All I can say is this is sure a boring thread. Here's is a film photograph followed by a digital one, both of which I like, which is just as irrelevant to the real world as else anything else in this thread — and that, I suppose, makes my post here relevant; but televant to what? Actually, I just asked myself why I'm posting this — and all I can think of is that it's in penance for reading this whole thread...
Bangkok | Leica M6 | Summilux-50 pre-ASPH | Tri-X at ISO 1000 (?)
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/242/535777179_3716286132_o.jpg
Bangkok | Ricoh GXR/A12 | 50mm EFOV | ISO 800 | f/8.0 | 1/1000 sec
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4013/4293365875_8de86acfb9_o.jpg
—Mitch/Paris
Scratching the Surface (http://www.flickr.com/photos/malland/3288123582/in/set-72157621142420186/lightbox/)
The relevance is that the film image you posted will still be viewable in 40 years time. (Making some assumptions about proper storage).
Will the digital still be around in 40 years? Who knows? Does it even matter? ...Now, this is so absurd that it's funny.
—Mitch/Paris
Tokyo: It is love by people and special thanks for you (http://www.flickr.com/photos/malland/1329514827/in/set-72157601877119712/lightbox/)
sc_rufctr
10-11-2010, 06:48
Now, this is so absurd that it's funny.
—Mitch/Paris
Tokyo: It is love by people and special thanks for you (http://www.flickr.com/photos/malland/1329514827/in/set-72157601877119712/lightbox/)
Please explain. I'm trying to understand your point of view.
JayGannon
10-11-2010, 07:04
Yes they'd need to be renewed but as long as digital images are made up of 1's and 0's, it wouldn't be difficult nor expensive to do that.
People have already been paying for albums for all their life since the invention of the camera. Plus, I think $24 a year is cheaper than all those photo albums and you don't need to worry about misplacing them or the space they take up. Just remember your password though...:D
In the next 30-50 years, we'll have a different version of that "stumbling across the basement to find 50 yr old photos" scenario.
In the next 30-50 years, we'll have something like "I typed my grandpa's name on Flickr and I saw all his photos!" scenario:)
We have online photo albums where we can store digital images and as ridiculous as it may sound, I do believe they can last a hundred years there.
IT infrastructure and planning is a lot more reliable as anyone could think.
You have no idea what your talking about, data centre infrastructure is fluid, expensive and not easy at all, as a result most are badly planned and have a very bad service history.
So when a DC that has no disaster recovery provisions (upwards of 80%) succumbs to a natural or electrical disaster its gone. Everything stored there is null and void. As for lasting for 100 years, not many companies last for 100 years, the internet is not some magical tub in the sky, if a company goes down tomorrow their data goes down with them if they cant pay their bills, its happened many times in the past. Imagine what would happen if Facebook/Flickr went offline tomorrow, the world would lose somewhere in the region of 8 Billion photos. Not as likely to happen if their in your cupboard at home.
In summary storing photos online (not talking about home sotrage of digital photos) is both expensive, risky, unreliable and unproven. If its cheap/free its cheap/free for a reason.
Brian Sweeney
10-11-2010, 15:24
Honestly Dave, all loss of digital data can always be attributed to human error.
Face it Flounder, you trusted us.
The relevance is that the film image you posted will still be viewable in 40 years time. (Making some assumptions about proper storage).
Simply change the word 'film' to 'digital' and the statement is still perfectly true. So don't worry too much about it.
Digital has made photography available to more people than it has ruined it for. Whether it is a style of photography that appeals to you is a matter of taste.
You have no idea what your talking about, data centre infrastructure is fluid, expensive and not easy at all, as a result most are badly planned and have a very bad service history.
So when a DC that has no disaster recovery provisions (upwards of 80%) succumbs to a natural or electrical disaster its gone. Everything stored there is null and void. As for lasting for 100 years, not many companies last for 100 years, the internet is not some magical tub in the sky, if a company goes down tomorrow their data goes down with them if they cant pay their bills, its happened many times in the past. Imagine what would happen if Facebook/Flickr went offline tomorrow, the world would lose somewhere in the region of 8 Billion photos. Not as likely to happen if their in your cupboard at home.
In summary storing photos online (not talking about home sotrage of digital photos) is both expensive, risky, unreliable and unproven. If its cheap/free its cheap/free for a reason.
You have no idea how good DC's are. It is SOP for DC's to have disaster recovery plan. One of their solutions for example is to have another DC in another location that mimics the original DC.
Only a large enough disaster, something the covers a really, really large area can kill all those information. But if that disaster happens, all your film and photo albums might as well be dead too.:p
As I have said, online photo albums being a lucrative business is enough to give them a long enough lifespan. If an online photo album closes, why not let another company take over it's data? I'm sure it's a good option for that another company.
Digital photos having no tangible "negatives" are not a downside of digitalization of photography. It simply has a different set of needs in order for it to be taken care of to last a long time. People need to catch up with how to properly take care of digital photos just as how people caught up on how to take care of negatives. It's possible that there are also millions of photos lost during the time that photography was new to the masses because of improper storage of negatives.
JayGannon
10-13-2010, 05:46
You have no idea how good DC's are. It is SOP for DC's to have disaster recovery plan. One of their solutions for example is to have another DC in another location that mimics the original DC.
Thats what disaster recovery is, and its most certainly not SOP in any colo house or 75% of dedicated facilities.
Only a large enough disaster, something the covers a really, really large area can kill all those information. But if that disaster happens, all your film and photo albums might as well be dead too.:p
Not if the DC is single homed and/or has no DR plan.
As I have said, online photo albums being a lucrative business is enough to give them a long enough lifespan. If an online photo album closes, why not let another company take over it's data? I'm sure it's a good option for that another company.
Its not that easy, usually the servers have been siezed and sold as compensation for creditors before anyone would consider buying the IP on a photo album company.
Digital photos having no tangible "negatives" are not a downside of digitalization of photography. It simply has a different set of needs in order for it to be taken care of to last a long time. People need to catch up with how to properly take care of digital photos just as how people caught up on how to take care of negatives. It's possible that there are also millions of photos lost during the time that photography was new to the masses because of improper storage of negatives.
Yes but online file storage is not that solution.
This thread puzzles me... I think most you guys are not that old, yet you ramble like the old men playing cards in a bar.
Digital lowered the average quality of photos? Take a step back and look at the big picture: today billions of picture are taken every day, no wonder that there is a huge pile of crap around... yet, every day i spend looking pictures on the net, i also see some beautiful, inspiring shot I'm happy I didn't miss. Slowly, crap will flow away, but even if lot of new ****ty pics will follow, the good ones will find their way to stay.
And unsurprisingly, it is always been this way! Go open your granpa box, keep the pics around, let the nostalgia step away and you'll realize that most of them are boring, forgettable, not good at all. And that the very good ones are those that were already moved in his night table, or scattered around the house on the wall next to the fireplace.
Two cents on storage too: surprisingly, lot of negatives taken by mankind were lost. Most of them. Destroyed by floods, quakes, mice, humidity but mostly thrown away.
If you plan to keep it, saving data is much easier and safer: just keep it in (at least) two different places! Like, a copy online and one in your pc, or in two different disks and if you lose one copy just make another one. Easy, cheap, failproof.
Photography is now a shadow of it's former self. Digital has cheapened almost every aspect of it (not monetarily either), and it now requires little commitment to get into.
Some may argue that this is a good thing - easier for the masses, yada yada. I will argue it just produces more crap with less critical editing of any of it. To the people arguing that said crap has always been around - it surely hasn't been in the same level of quantity. Use your brain, people weren't taking 200 frames of nonsense at a particular setting because they were limited (pay attention now: limitations) by the media they used to record it with: film.
Limitations are incredibly powerful concepts that impose hard requirements of innovation, thinking outside the box, and commitment to produce results above the board. Once limitations become less and options rise, the end result is almost always counter-intuitive to what people would think: quality actually diminishes. It may sound a bit "out there," but either you understand what I'm talking about or you don't.
Signal to noise ratio has absolutely gone down.
Nikon Bob
10-17-2010, 04:15
clayne
The only way photography is a shadow of it's former self is that many more people are doing it but far less with film.
There has always been a huge amount of sub par photos even in the film only days. Yes, there are many more sub par photos today but I am thinking as a ratio it is still about the same as before. You just notice it more today with the advent of the net which makes it easier to see them as opposed to when they were hidden away in somebodies shoe box.
Limitations imposed by the equipment we use are just that limitations. Self imposed limitations, like culling your shots, are another thing altogether. When I use an old Barnack Leica I wonder how the photographers were able to produce such good results when Barnacks were the cutting edge of their day. I also think that that those same photographers, if alive today, would be the first to use the latest gear and appreciate how it would have made their job much easier and opened more avenues to explore.
Bob
http://www.wired.com/culture/design/magazine/17-03/dp_intro
For a design-oriented take on what I'm talking about with regards to limitations. There is such a thing as too many options. It's the limitations that allow one to focus without distraction or reconsideration.
Also, the ratio is totally skewed these days. Your average individual wasn't wasting more than a roll on something interesting only to themselves. The limitation of "x number of shots" was the governor of that. We have never lived in a time before with the sheer amount of data and distractions that daily life offers us today. As a society, we believe that all of this offers us more "power," "connectedness," and agility in daily life.
The truth is another matter entirely.
Andy Kibber
10-17-2010, 04:59
Also, the ratio is totally skewed these days. Your average individual wasn't wasting more than a roll on something interesting only to themselves. The limitation of "x number of shots" was the governor of that.
I agree. Let's ration the number of pictures folks are allowed to take and post online. We can set up panels to establish what photographic subjects are interesting to those other than the photographer and adjust the ration accordingly.
Nikon Bob
10-17-2010, 05:29
clayne
Yea, there is such a thing as too many options being confusing and distracting. I use a D700 and love it dearly but would appreciate a dumbed down version for most of what I do. Trying to be everything to everyone is maybe not such a good plan in all cases. OTH where would we be if we never reconsidered our approach to anything. Ansel Adams has done the same print a number of different ways so you can make an argument for re considerations and that there is no single correct interpretation of a subject, even the same one from the same artist.
I could not agree more with the fact that we are inundated with the sheer volume of data today more so than ever before. You have exercise the self discipline to shift through the chaff to find the kernels. Difficult and time consuming but there it is. Contrary to popular belief that we are more connected today that ever before, I feel that we are more isolated, Case in point is what we are doing right now and not doing face to face over coffee.
Bob
Nikon Bob
10-17-2010, 05:36
I agree. Let's ration the number of pictures folks are allowed to take and post online. We can set up panels to establish what photographic subjects are interesting to those other than the photographer and adjust the ration accordingly.
Good point Andy, photography is for the enjoyment of the photographer and if they are happy with what they are doing who am I to rain on there parade. Everyone's taste and what they find interesting and worthwhile in a photograph is different. Just be a panel of one and ignore what you don't like. Doing photography for a living/professionally you had better know what other people, clients, like and cater to that, even if you don't like to do that, or you become a starving artist in a hurry.
Bob
Nikon Bob
10-17-2010, 09:42
You make a valid point, Bob. "Adapt and survive".
Though even in "art" photography, the cream will always rise to the top.
Yea, the cream as judged by others, not the original photographer, and you can be along time dead or poor or both before you get such recognition.
Bob
tinyrobot
12-18-2010, 05:10
There will be no film and digital cameras in the future. There will be only Canon hairdryers that can shoot RAW at 60fps as Cameron predicts!
If a photographer embraces digital, part of the learning process is to get to grips with having backups of your data. Anyone who uses a computer should do this anyway, if you don't you deserve every bad thing that happens on your system.
I'm writing a digital archiving system currently, I fully understand the challenges involved with preservation of digital media. I can 100% say that I have no idea if my pictures will still be accessible in a digital format in 40 years, but I do know that I'm doing everything I can to make sure they are. I also know for a fact that it's very easy to let my software make a pure backup onto my servers at work, which in turn backup to servers in other countries. How would I do that with my films? Sure I can make prints, but if I loose the negs, I've lost the original.
With film, you will only ever have 1 copy of the original. With digital, it's free and instant to make as many copies of the RAW, PNG, and JPEG files I keep of every photo. Storage is cheap, computers are cheap, software is cheap - the only problem with digital is people need to learn new skills and if we are honest with ourselves, that's normally the barrier.
jsrockit
12-30-2010, 08:17
Digital has not ruined anything for anyone. It's actually allowed the average person to make technically better photos. Ever seen the crap the average person got out of a disc camera or a 110 camera?
sc_rufctr
12-31-2010, 19:09
Film has no inbuilt redundancy... If you store it correctly then it should last indefinitely.
Meanwhile you can scan film and store it digitally on a "complex" digital storage solution.
Also... With properly stored film you have the option of re scanning the negative 10 years down the track.
It's the ultimate "backup".
There is no "free lunch" with film or digital...
Either way you'll have to pay to store your images long term regardless of what medium they're shot on.
------------------------------------------------
My film photos look better than anything I've shot on digital.
Often from a roll of 36 exposures I've got 36 usable images.
The same can't be said for many digital photos. Often it takes 70 or more shots to get 5 or 6 usable images. (what I would call usable)
The reason for this? I think it's the photographers attitude more than anything else.
Because many people think that digital photography is free they don't seem to care as much about actually taking that individual photo... That one that makes the grade.
Digital has not ruined anything for anyone. It's actually allowed the average person to make technically better photos. Ever seen the crap the average person got out of a disc camera or a 110 camera?
People with digital cameras are not taking any less crap photos than they were with film, they are simply taking more of them. And because they take more, eventually when they stumble on a good one, they choose not to delete it.
The average person deletes a lot of digital photos. Whether that be at the time of taking, or when uploading to facebook.
Archiver
05-15-2011, 01:54
When I look through the photo albums that my family (and related families) have collected over the years, I see reams and reams of posed family photos destroyed by flash. There were hardly any landscapes, streetscapes or candids, and certainly no natural light photography, not indoors. Candid photos? Forget it. Interesting storytelling stuff from when we were kids? No way.
Even though my Dad owned a Minolta SR-T and a Pentax ME, as time went by he bought a mid level Nikon P&S. That was the main family camera for years, from 1987 or earlier. When I tried taking anything outside of posed nonsense when we went on trips, Dad would grumble that I was wasting film! He'd spend money to take us on trips but not want to record what we were actually SEEING, yet stupid posed photographs of us standing next to statues was desirable. And this was a man with whole collection of camera magazines, but I digress.
My Mum and I played with film cameras for non-stupid-posed photographs, including flowers and animals, but the cost of buying and developing film meant that we didn't do too much of that.
When I got my first digital camera in late 2002, I took hundreds of photos of anything and everything. The freedom to shoot gave me the ability to explore and experiment. So much so that when I got into film in 2006, I was immediately shooting street, candids, landscapes, low light, cityscapes, still life, architecture and everything else that was absent from the family photography albums.
And since I knew that my shots were far more limited with film, I took everything that I had learned from digital shooting and used it to make my film images count.
Before digital photography my family was living in a tiny little world of flash-lit posed photos with the subjects smack in the centre. Digital photography changed all of that for the better. Now Dad has a Canon G11 and he takes photos of hotel rooms, food, landscapes, and all the things that he tended to avoid with film.
So, no, digital has not ruined photography for average people. Not for us.
^ Using flash doesn't destroy photos.
I had a revelation today. I think that's the word, something hit me in the head hard and pang, thoughts were clear. Think that describes it.
Anyway, I believe it's harder to learn photography, the art of photography, with digital technology. And I'm a digital enthusiast. There is simply too much help, even if you shoot 100% manual with a digi cam, processing is going on in the background which helps you when you get to playing with the RAW. You get instant access to your pictures, meaning the objective viewpoint is non-existant for many.
It's free to take thousands of shots in a 2 hour walk, so people do. Out of say 500 shots, one will be make-nice-able in Lightroom. Digital can treat you to edit your work down to 1/500th of what you shot, but that is the art of hiding the failures, not the art of photography.
I don't know how to describe what I'm thinking. I was at an exhibition today at the Tate, and the photographs were nothing more than snapshots of interesting locations. The photos actually were poor, considering how great the location could have been. The colours and effects made the pictures more interesting, but that was Lightroom and Photoshop at work. The camera's CPU was at work. The printer, the RIP, the technology was at work to make those great colours. The stuff the tech could not do, the composition, the decision when to fire, the place to stand etc, were all wrong on these pictures.
Anyway, that's an unfinished thought streaming from my head.
Brian Sweeney
05-15-2011, 10:04
That is an interesting point of view, coming from a digital enthusiast that just started shooting with a film leica.
I've been shooting Digital since it was in it's infancy. "In Those Days" shooting digital was more difficult than using film. As in reading the technical manuals and writing your own image processing software. I wrote thousands of lines of FORTRAN and assembly to produce my images.
I honestly believe that as much thought and care can go into the making of a digital image. Take the time and care that you use with the M6, or whatever film camera that you use- and treat the digital camera as if it were the same process. It all comes down to exposure, focus, and composition. M6, M9, or x100. They all let you take as much time and care as you wish to invest in making the image.
Oh I agree, and in some ways I think you and I had similar beginnings with digital. I wrote many pieces of conversion software. I worked in the feature film industry for a fair while, as an artist, but would get dragged into writing yet another piece of software to aid the path towards digital imaging.
I believe there is a very different way of thinking between digital and analogue, and only after much practice can you blur the two. At the start digital can hinder you as you try to learn photography. After n years, it can help you. But it should never be allowed to make any decisions for you, not unless you know how and why those decisions are made.
This is all my opinion, and this is a complex discussion, so it's likely to warp after more thought.
Archiver
05-15-2011, 21:28
^ Using flash doesn't destroy photos.
You should see the family photos. Whited-out people with infernally red eyes and black, overshadowed backgrounds litter the photo albums. :mad: Flash doesn't destroy photos, incompetent photography destroys photos. But flash is a powerful weapon in that destruction.
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