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No new cameras?

Jorgen Udvang

Subscriber Member
However, while the cameras might be free, let's not think about the film costs...=8^O

G
I don't know about the cost of instant film, but I find conventional film rather reasonable compared to lots of other activities that I could have spent my time and money on, and the memories caught on film are forever. Sometimes, I compare it to playing golf. 18 holes around here, all expenses covered, is mostly $40-100. I have friends who do that once or twice every week. I can buy an old camera and film for that. Every week.

So many things these days are based on instant gratification and almost instant obsolescence, even photos. Taken with an iPhone, posted on Facebook, forever forgotten.
 

Ben Rubinstein

Active member
:ROTFL:

"Tinkering" in the sense that there are so many subtile lighting tools to work with and different effects you get with different types of lights and modifiers ... and all the tech stuff like durations and so on ... love figuring out that stuff!

- Marc
It is all as subtle and often subjective as a lens drawing or the colour qualities of a specific sensor. Photo geeks talk about each element as if it was the defining factor whereas the artists put it all together to make a wonderful whole. It's why the talk on some forums can be so depressing sometimes. The talk of this lens or this sensor or this octabox or this strobe or whatever. They are all just pieces of the puzzle. The artist has a vision in mind which needs every element to come together, each adding it's own subtle and almost irrelevant advantages so that the final product as a whole is so powerful. That said I honestly believe we would see far better work as a whole if the geek talk was more about lighting and less about lens sharpness. :D
 

Godfrey

Well-known member
I don't know about the cost of instant film, but I find conventional film rather reasonable compared to lots of other activities that I could have spent my time and money on, and the memories caught on film are forever. Sometimes, I compare it to playing golf. 18 holes around here, all expenses covered, is mostly $40-100. I have friends who do that once or twice every week. I can buy an old camera and film for that. Every week.

So many things these days are based on instant gratification and almost instant obsolescence, even photos. Taken with an iPhone, posted on Facebook, forever forgotten.
Instant print cameras are not the iPhone model. The photos are available pretty quickly, but they last "forever" or some simulation thereof, and they're physical things that get stuffed into shoeboxes, etc. ;-)

Currently, Impossible Project film for SX-70 and Spectra cameras costs about US$24 for eight exposures, or about $3 and a little bit per picture. A pack a day is an expensive habit ...

G


Waiting - Palo Alto 2013
Polaroid Spectra Onyx, Imposslble Project Silver Shade Cool
(scanned with iPad mini camera)
 
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Ben Rubinstein

Active member
My day job when I'm not moonlighting as the art director of a local college (don't laugh, it's mainly an admin job) is managing 3 repro studios. We are photographing manuscripts, documents, artifacts, etc from the past 800 years. It's sobering to think that 100 years from now they will have difficulty reading most of what has been written during the past decade and 300 years from now it will probably be impossible. This morning I was reading while photographing through the court transcripts from the beginning of the 20th century from the Rabbinical Courts in Essaouira in Morocco (the city was once 40% Jews, brought there by the Sultan) with the Moroccan authorities stamps of approval on each page. Years of a huge wealth of information as to the way of life of the Jewish community in that city. Documents, contracts, notes, treatises, etc. Legible and readable. This is just a tiny amount of the history I have been digitizing in the 'Archive of the Jewish People' in Jerusalem over the past month, we have a contract with them at present before they are swallowed by the National Library. I've photographed a prayer book from 1200's which I could read as clearly as a modern day text and I've no training in ancient scripts. 800 years from now will our musings and thoughts, our history and law, our images, be as accessible as history is now? Yeah right.
 

Godfrey

Well-known member
Well, no one can know for sure—anyone's vision of the future is murky at best. But I find the notion that we won't be able to somewhat desperate. Presuming we don't all die in a planetary catastrophe and that the large scale climate changes that we are expecting don't reduce us to a pre-technological society with no access to the tools we have today, I see no reason that we will lose any of what we're now accumulating into our accessible information stores in a form that is infinitely replicable with zero loss.

What, I wonder, is the percentage of texts made in 1200 AD that have survived to the present? I suspect that a) the number of texts made were virtually nothing compared to what is created today, and b) that which survived is but a minuscule fraction of what was created.

We have technology and information at our disposal today that was NEVER available before. These works you are recording? They've been in the dark with respect to the general public for centuries .. effectively non-existent. So I think the future, barring enormous and extreme calamity, is far brighter than "yeah, right." I maintain faith that the future will unfold and expand, not collapse and disappear.

Hopefully that laser gamma burst of an exploding supernova yesterday in Andromeda is aimed somewhere else .. ;-)

G
 

Jorgen Udvang

Subscriber Member
While it sounds reasonable that a large portion of what is recorded today will be available in a 100 years, it is food for thought that it is very difficult to find devices that read media that were very common just a couple of decades ago, like 5 1/4" floppies, not to speak about 8". iomega zip drive? Some data are transferred to new devices when the old ones become obsolete, but lots of it aren't. When the hard drives fade out, who will take responsibility for transferring incredible amounts of data to SSD or whatever is in fashion in ten years from now?

Those with resources, governments etc., will of course, which is like it's ever been, and what is stored will be selected by those loyal to the governments or other institutions. That's not always the way the average man sees reality. Those b&w negatives from my mother's Brownie on the other hand, that's sixties style reality according to me, and they can still be copied and read by a pair of human eyes :)
 

fotografz

Well-known member
While it sounds reasonable that a large portion of what is recorded today will be available in a 100 years, it is food for thought that it is very difficult to find devices that read media that were very common just a couple of decades ago, like 5 1/4" floppies, not to speak about 8". iomega zip drive? Some data are transferred to new devices when the old ones become obsolete, but lots of it aren't. When the hard drives fade out, who will take responsibility for transferring incredible amounts of data to SSD or whatever is in fashion in ten years from now?

Those with resources, governments etc., will of course, which is like it's ever been, and what is stored will be selected by those loyal to the governments or other institutions. That's not always the way the average man sees reality. Those b&w negatives from my mother's Brownie on the other hand, that's sixties style reality according to me, and they can still be copied and read by a pair of human eyes :)
I agree. I think it is Unicorn wishes and cotton candy dreams that the recording of family level images and life as we know it now on a day-to-day basis will survive in the manner that analog images tended to do.

When lack of immediate importance shelved print images from the last century, they got stuck in a drawer to be discovered by later generations. I know what my great grand father, and grandfather as a young man in WW-I, looked like because of that.

Now I'm not so sure what will survive. As mentioned, I plead with clients to stay on top of technological changes, and to my knowledge none of them from a decade ago have done so.


It is the year 2295. Technology has advanced to the point that what you see can be recorded and stored without any device that we would remotely recognize today.

At an archeology dig in what was once NYC before the great Tsunami of 2153, they come across a DVD. The assistant asks the Archeologist "What is this?" She replies ... "I have no idea". :ROTFL:


- Marc
 

Godfrey

Well-known member
While it sounds reasonable that a large portion of what is recorded today will be available in a 100 years, it is food for thought that it is very difficult to find devices that read media that were very common just a couple of decades ago, like 5 1/4" floppies, not to speak about 8". iomega zip drive? Some data are transferred to new devices when the old ones become obsolete, but lots of it aren't. When the hard drives fade out, who will take responsibility for transferring incredible amounts of data to SSD or whatever is in fashion in ten years from now?
This is the conventional viewpoint, and the stem from which all the negative views of the future branch.

BUT ... The past couple of decades has been a time of enormous change and growth, a turbulent era where standards were not well-formed, or documented, until near the end of it. Where the technology was coming into being, not a stable state.

I think the whole has grown much more sophisticated now, that those who create the systems understand the need for standards and welcome them. I don't think we're headed backwards into a time of chaos and lack of standards. With standards comes future security. The systems are reaching ... not maturity, but critical mass where it becomes difficult to lose the information needed entirely. Unless the catastrophic calamity occurs.

Those who do not understand the systems are likely to get left behind, JUST LIKE how those who did not understand how to protect their film and their prints were in many cases left behind and lost their photos to floods, fires, and other degradation. There's nothing any individual can do about that.

Anything sufficiently valued will be carried forwards. Anything not sufficiently valued will not. Just like it has always been. The technology is different, the ease of access less "natural" but assuming we don't lose the plot entirely, it won't be lost. And if we do lose the plot, well, we've likely going to have lost it all anyway as our survival in the numbers we are now depends upon the complexity of our world as it is for a lot of the basic essentials.

We must all take responsibility to ensure the future. Migrate your data, publish your work, get it into the Library of Congress so that larger organizations curate and caretake it. Think about your exit plan ... What will happen to your photography, the work of your lifetime, when you are no longer around? Do you plan to just dump it on your friends and family, assuming they will value it and take care of it? I do not, I plan to move what I cherish in my work into artifacts, digital and print, that others can cherish past me. Publish or perish, for real.

I refuse to take a negative view of the future. It is the Zeitgeist to do so, but I feel that view is wrong. It's the view of old men not willing to move forward, of adamant conservatism. "I want the world as it was when it was good (when I was a child)."

I don't want a lot of the crap I saw happening when I was a child. I don't want the level of poverty, the fallibility to disease and despair, and the unconnectedness of vast parts of the world that was rampant in the 1950s, 1960s. So much has improved world wide ... with some losses, yes ... but I find it impossible to accept that all is going bad and that the future will be dark, dark, dark forever.

If I accept that belief, what point is there to my photography other than to express my pain and despair? That's not how I want to live. And I won't.

G
 

Ben Rubinstein

Active member
Most of the most important documents I am photographing at present survived because they were used as bookmarks. The most important information from today will survive but who gets to decide what is important? Governments usually, they are the ones who can afford it. Do you trust the worlds governments to make the correct decisions? The books and documents I have been working with over the past year and a half have all, every single one, been stored by private families. Private families will not and most probably cannot store the personal digital domains of their ancestors for 100's of years.

Even if we rely on the governments and large libraries, whatever they decide I promise you it will not include our family pictures. How many print pictures anymore? Do we think that the huge facebook galleries which have replaced prints will be available to show our grandchildren? As Marc says, it's easy to shove a picture into a drawer, how many know and will be savvy nevermind interested enough to enable digital continuation for the future of their own lives? Even if all of facebooks images will be stored for the future, a wild assumption at best, whose grandchildren will have the passwords? Will go through the bother to get legal rights to access those albums 100 years from now?

I stopped providing proofs from my weddings a few years back, the clients didn't want it. Disk and an album. Fine. Few years back I went through my parents in laws wedding proofs from 1967. Good photographer actually for all that us modern shooters disparage the old 'pose everything' photographers of yester year. Was fascinating as they took us through their pictures, telling us the stories of people long dead and gone. Those B&W prints will still be there 100 years from now. There is a huge box of old photos in their garage, mainly pictures that the grandmother managed to bring over when she (luckily) left Germany in 1935. A history of my wifes family in Germany among which we found, scanned, printed and framed a family tree going back decades in pre war Frankfurt. They are still there. Still will be there. The digital photo record will not. Honestly do not believe that families and individuals will have the know how, money and interest to make sure that their viewpoint on our generation, that vital link to being able to understand how we really lived our lives, will be stored for the fascination of generations to come.

Those disks that were given to my clients are Delkin 100 year Archival Disks. Sounds good in the advertising but we all know that getting those disks read 50 years from now even is going to cost a lot of money and be difficult to do. They will have their Album, 80 pictures or so. But that is just 80 out of over 1000. A snapshot of the wedding. How will they sit with their grandchildren 50 years from now and explain who all those people sitting at the tables were? Yes we put stuff in the contract about always updating to newer media, I promise you almost none will. Now the wedding business is giving images on USB sticks. It just gets worse...

The organisation I work for has a clear goal with all the books and manuscripts we have photographed. To use the images to print 2 copies of each one to be stored in two locations (not my province thank goodness). These are people who are thinking in the realms of hundreds of years, they know how little survived until now and they want to provide the future world with what we had today. When you are thinking in the realms of centuries, you don't put your trust in digital, certainly not digital alone.

4 years ago I lost a RAID hard disk set up. Had 6 months of family pics I hadn't backed up yet, I hadn't run the backups as thoroughly as I had with my work stuff. 3 months of that hadn't been printed yet. I managed to recover 2 months of it but a month is gone. And I'm a pro photographer who at least was printing and backing up. The general charlie's out there, well I think this decade will tell of perhaps the most photographs ever taken and the fewest kept for future generations.
 

Shashin

Well-known member
That would be governments and universities that are the largest archives. And so far, they have been proven to be very good at that.

The problem with physical objects are better is there really is no data. Physical objects get destroyed and are lost and we are unaware of most that is lost. Early film history is a classic example of physical media either being distorted or simply decaying itself--nitrates are really not a long term solution for anything. And the idea that every family photo, every food-on-my-plate image, every stupid party picture actually has to be saved for history is not really a great idea. Most of what is made today could get lost and the world will be no worse off.

As for the impermanence of digital data, that is far from proven. The physical media so far has been the biggest problem, but that was always the problem, even in the analog world--how are those 8-tracks working out? The data itself can be easily opened as most of the data are on universal standards--jpeg, tif, etc. Your Photoshop files might be problematic in a hundred years.

But whether physical or digital, it comes down to the same thing, take care of your stuff.
 

Jorgen Udvang

Subscriber Member
But whether physical or digital, it comes down to the same thing, take care of your stuff.
That is of course the key to it all, but while all kinds of people, mothers, grandmothers, uncles and aunts, often took good care of their physical photos, made albums etc., very few make backups of their computers or smartphones. Most don't even know how to do that. And again: Those backups are probably useless in less than a 100 years anyway, since the devices can't be connected to any device that might be able to read it.

I've been working with computers since the early seventies. None of the storage devices that were in use for the first 10 of those years can be read today unless one digs up a working device from some museum. Even the early PC HDDs are becoming a challenge, since the bus interface have been changing, and now we are talking about units that are sometimes less than 20 years old. I'm sure there are many people out there with old backups on HDD units that they will have difficulty reading because of this. 20 more years? Forget about it.
 

fotografz

Well-known member
This is the conventional viewpoint, and the stem from which all the negative views of the future branch.

BUT ... The past couple of decades has been a time of enormous change and growth, a turbulent era where standards were not well-formed, or documented, until near the end of it. Where the technology was coming into being, not a stable state.

I think the whole has grown much more sophisticated now, that those who create the systems understand the need for standards and welcome them. I don't think we're headed backwards into a time of chaos and lack of standards. With standards comes future security. The systems are reaching ... not maturity, but critical mass where it becomes difficult to lose the information needed entirely. Unless the catastrophic calamity occurs.

Those who do not understand the systems are likely to get left behind, JUST LIKE how those who did not understand how to protect their film and their prints were in many cases left behind and lost their photos to floods, fires, and other degradation. There's nothing any individual can do about that.

Anything sufficiently valued will be carried forwards. Anything not sufficiently valued will not. Just like it has always been. The technology is different, the ease of access less "natural" but assuming we don't lose the plot entirely, it won't be lost. And if we do lose the plot, well, we've likely going to have lost it all anyway as our survival in the numbers we are now depends upon the complexity of our world as it is for a lot of the basic essentials.

We must all take responsibility to ensure the future. Migrate your data, publish your work, get it into the Library of Congress so that larger organizations curate and caretake it. Think about your exit plan ... What will happen to your photography, the work of your lifetime, when you are no longer around? Do you plan to just dump it on your friends and family, assuming they will value it and take care of it? I do not, I plan to move what I cherish in my work into artifacts, digital and print, that others can cherish past me. Publish or perish, for real.

I refuse to take a negative view of the future. It is the Zeitgeist to do so, but I feel that view is wrong. It's the view of old men not willing to move forward, of adamant conservatism. "I want the world as it was when it was good (when I was a child)."

I don't want a lot of the crap I saw happening when I was a child. I don't want the level of poverty, the fallibility to disease and despair, and the unconnectedness of vast parts of the world that was rampant in the 1950s, 1960s. So much has improved world wide ... with some losses, yes ... but I find it impossible to accept that all is going bad and that the future will be dark, dark, dark forever.

If I accept that belief, what point is there to my photography other than to express my pain and despair? That's not how I want to live. And I won't.

G

A Utopian view propagated by the Photographic elite.

Like all Utopian tainted delusions it chides old men unwilling to change that grasp onto the past, while painting a picture of the future as a heroically uplifted youthful face looking forward into the brightness like a Soviet era propaganda poster.

We are not talking about the smidgen of photographers represented here, a minuscule few grains of sand on a 1,000 mile long beach. Not the photographic record of the few curated by the even fewer caretakers of culture.

The subject in question is the private record of families, not art, or cultural milestones, nor what the elite think is worth keeping.

Jorgen sums it up in a "real world" manner ... family photographic records once "curated" by the maternal members of families ... which seems to have crossed all lines of social/racial/cultural/national boundaries. Notably, the only device required to view these icons of family life were your own two eyes.

To that I'd add that the previous process helped assure a more intact family record. People could not see the images unless they printed them. Those prints were sorted and lovingly saved in albums and/or the ubiquitous shoe boxes. Barring some natural disaster, these were forwarded down from generation to generation. That they were deemed precious is apparent when often the one possession people grabbed when hurriedly fleeing an impending disaster is ... the family album. People who lose every material possession to Tornados/Floods/Hurricanes often most lament the loss of their family photos because it is the one thing insurance cannot replace.

Granted, today there are methods of preservation and storage that should withstand the test of time while even protecting against natural disasters ... namely off-premises mass storage as a back-up to any physical record. Again, Jorgen nails it ... very few are doing that. And as devices move on into the future, there is even less assurance of preservation.

I think this may have become prevalent behavior today because there is no highly visible company promoting it like Kodak once did. Add to that the "fight or flight" reaction to the geekified nature of digital preservation.

As the Apple iPhone ads like to point out ... "More photos are taken with an iPhone than any other camera." "Taken", not "Kept".

Here is an idea for Apple ... take a hint from Kodak, who despite their more recent failure is largely responsible for generation upon generation of family photographic records. If Apple were to promote preservation, and made it a method of the common person, most certainly the situation would improve. Make it as easy to preserve as it is to take a photo.

Oh well, back to scanning and printing my pile of family prints from the 1960s to the 90s ... from which the scans themselves no one wants ... so I have to print them.

- Marc
 

alajuela

Active member
A Utopian view propagated by the Photographic elite.

Like all Utopian tainted delusions it chides old men unwilling to change that grasp onto the past, while painting a picture of the future as a heroically uplifted youthful face looking forward into the brightness like a Soviet era propaganda poster.

We are not talking about the smidgen of photographers represented here, a minuscule few grains of sand on a 1,000 mile long beach. Not the photographic record of the few curated by the even fewer caretakers of culture.

The subject in question is the private record of families, not art, or cultural milestones, nor what the elite think is worth keeping.

Jorgen sums it up in a "real world" manner ... family photographic records once "curated" by the maternal members of families ... which seems to have crossed all lines of social/racial/cultural/national boundaries. Notably, the only device required to view these icons of family life were your own two eyes.

To that I'd add that the previous process helped assure a more intact family record. People could not see the images unless they printed them. Those prints were sorted and lovingly saved in albums and/or the ubiquitous shoe boxes. Barring some natural disaster, these were forwarded down from generation to generation. That they were deemed precious is apparent when often the one possession people grabbed when hurriedly fleeing an impending disaster is ... the family album. People who lose every material possession to Tornados/Floods/Hurricanes often most lament the loss of their family photos because it is the one thing insurance cannot replace.

Granted, today there are methods of preservation and storage that should withstand the test of time while even protecting against natural disasters ... namely off-premises mass storage as a back-up to any physical record. Again, Jorgen nails it ... very few are doing that. And as devices move on into the future, there is even less assurance of preservation.

I think this may have become prevalent behavior today because there is no highly visible company promoting it like Kodak once did. Add to that the "fight or flight" reaction to the geekified nature of digital preservation.

As the Apple iPhone ads like to point out ... "More photos are taken with an iPhone than any other camera." "Taken", not "Kept".

Here is an idea for Apple ... take a hint from Kodak, who despite their more recent failure is largely responsible for generation upon generation of family photographic records. If Apple were to promote preservation, and made it a method of the common person, most certainly the situation would improve. Make it as easy to preserve as it is to take a photo.

Oh well, back to scanning and printing my pile of family prints from the 1960s to the 90s ... from which the scans themselves no one wants ... so I have to print them.

- Marc
Funny :ROTFL: never thought of myself as "Photographic Elite" nor partaking of utopian propaganda. Nor do I feel that the members here are smidgens. Now that we are done setting up straw men to make a point. I suggest - we put things in context. Nobody was promised immortality, and certainly not the work they "left behind".

I am well aware of the importance of family memories captured in photography. Also apparently need to add , all memories lost thru fire, neglect, or outright destruction. I think what Ben is doing, is a service to mankind, (not the utopian dream) We should step back a moment and consider what he is actually doing. Recording centuries old documents in a medium that people will be able to study and handle w/o ruining the originals.

I don't subscribe to the "Chicken Little" theory that all that is recorded digitally will become obsolete and unusable in the future. I too worked with computer in the late 60's, - Information is kept and archived if important to someone. If not - "pays your money and takes your chances", - how many of us "few" have lost negatives due to negligence, or just bad luck? We can cite all the beta max's examples we want, as long as there is a need somebody will fill it. Just because technology moves on, does not mean, that it leaves all behind, - again I would cite what Ben is doing,.

Please find the basis of "family photographic records once "curated" by the maternal members of families" is that not romantic and truly a myth? Also I don't think parsing Apple's propaganda, serves any purpose, other than to sell more iPhones. - Also last i heard Apple does offer iCloud.

I am, as stated a proponent of prints, that is the way I introduced to Photography, and my preferred way to view images. But it serves no purpose to belittle or humiliate people who use their phones to take pictures of food, - it is non threatening and harmless, maybe the way people once thought about "Rock n' Roll"?

my 2 cents - I will go back to working on a print

Phil
 

fotografz

Well-known member
Funny :ROTFL: never thought of myself as "Photographic Elite" nor partaking of utopian propaganda. Nor do I feel that the members here are smidgens. Now that we are done setting up straw men to make a point. I suggest - we put things in context. Nobody was promised immortality, and certainly not the work they "left behind".

I am well aware of the importance of family memories captured in photography. Also apparently need to add , all memories lost thru fire, neglect, or outright destruction. I think what Ben is doing, is a service to mankind, (not the utopian dream) We should step back a moment and consider what he is actually doing. Recording centuries old documents in a medium that people will be able to study and handle w/o ruining the originals.

I don't subscribe to the "Chicken Little" theory that all that is recorded digitally will become obsolete and unusable in the future. I too worked with computer in the late 60's, - Information is kept and archived if important to someone. If not - "pays your money and takes your chances", - how many of us "few" have lost negatives due to negligence, or just bad luck? We can cite all the beta max's examples we want, as long as there is a need somebody will fill it. Just because technology moves on, does not mean, that it leaves all behind, - again I would cite what Ben is doing,.

Please find the basis of "family photographic records once "curated" by the maternal members of families" is that not romantic and truly a myth? Also I don't think parsing Apple's propaganda, serves any purpose, other than to sell more iPhones. - Also last i heard Apple does offer iCloud.

I am, as stated a proponent of prints, that is the way I introduced to Photography, and my preferred way to view images. But it serves no purpose to belittle or humiliate people who use their phones to take pictures of food, - it is non threatening and harmless, maybe the way people once thought about "Rock n' Roll"?

my 2 cents - I will go back to working on a print

Phil
"Smidgen" is a slang unit of measure, not a personal description ... meaning small amount compared to the whole. As in, our efforts here add up to a smidgen amongst the billions of images taken.

Elite is not a derogatory term as you seem to take it ... it refers to the best in a particular category :thumbup:

Ben is providing an elite service by helping preserving historically and culturally important documents :thumbs:

AGAIN, that isn't the concern. :lecture:

History has already proven you wrong regarding the preservation of generational family records. The loss is already well on its' way ... mostly out of technologically induced neglect. What Ben does has little to no meaning to someone taking family photos on a phone and not doing anything with them ... you keep confusing the two efforts.

Of course, some images succumb to unforeseen events whether analog or digital ... but as a rule, the vast majority of a family's past images did not. Exceptions to a rule do not eliminate the rule.

I cite Apple as a possible solution to the dilemma ... however, having a solution for preserving memories like the Cloud isn't the same as powerfully promoting it in the manner that Kodak did. More than any other, Apple seems in a position to make a course correction by adding just one more profitable attribute to their product ... preservation. Come on Apple, make it a no-brainer effort for everyday folks ... and pick up the torch that Kodak dropped.

Sticking our heads in the sand and singing "Don't worry, everything will be all right" won't fix this. Recognizing and revealing it will.

Then again, maybe no one but the photographic elite gives a shyt anymore. That could be a real possibility.:eek:

If so, I believe there will be some really disappointed people in the future.:cry:

- Marc
 

alajuela

Active member
"Smidgen" is a slang unit of measure, not a personal description ... meaning small amount compared to the whole. As in, our efforts here add up to a smidgen amongst the billions of images taken.

Elite is not a derogatory term as you seem to take it ... it refers to the best in a particular category :thumbup:

Ben is providing an elite service by helping preserving historically and culturally important documents :thumbs:

AGAIN, that isn't the concern. :lecture:

History has already proven you wrong regarding the preservation of generational family records. The loss is already well on its' way ... mostly out of technologically induced neglect. What Ben does has little to no meaning to someone taking family photos on a phone and not doing anything with them ... you keep confusing the two efforts.

Of course, some images succumb to unforeseen events whether analog or digital ... but as a rule, the vast majority of a family's past images did not. Exceptions to a rule do not eliminate the rule.

I cite Apple as a possible solution to the dilemma ... however, having a solution for preserving memories like the Cloud isn't the same as powerfully promoting it in the manner that Kodak did. More than any other, Apple seems in a position to make a course correction by adding just one more profitable attribute to their product ... preservation. Come on Apple, make it a no-brainer effort for everyday folks ... and pick up the torch that Kodak dropped.

Sticking our heads in the sand and singing "Don't worry, everything will be all right" won't fix this. Recognizing and revealing it will.

Then again, maybe no one but the photographic elite gives a shyt anymore. That could be a real possibility.:eek:

If so, I believe there will be some really disappointed people in the future.:cry:

- Marc
History can not prove me wrong as you any more more than you can prove a negative. Do you know - or anybody knows how much has been lost in photography or any physical records over time? The answer is no. We have an idea what has been destroyed ie War, Fire, Floods etc, but otherwise we know nothing, Unless we know how many photos have been taken and how many have been printed and how many survived, it is conjecture. We can all have opinions, but....

There is no confusion or lumping together the state of electronic images vs print images, the numbers are certainly skewed to electronic. First the ease, second the cost (zero) everything has a camera. As opposed to idyllic worlds of instancmatics and Polaroids.
Where there is no disagreement is that there is a huge - (sea change) drop in the number of images that get transferred to paper. On a personal level I also agree this is a loss and a pity. BUT I do not buy into the fatalistic attitude all is doom, that any format used today is going to be unreadable in the future. Nor do I feel that is optimistic, that is practical.

I just saw a new web site up with beautiful images, -- He also sells prints.

To make a note - what Ben is doing is exactly the same, digitizing records from a documents created 100's of years ago. The Dead Sea Scrolls have been digitized. As far as family archives are concerned - it is up to the family as it always has been - I would venture to say, the Rabbinic records of life then - if Photography would have been invented -- would be included, of course in print form to be digitized. Elite is not a word that comes to mind, any more than historians, archeologists or anthropologists are "elite".

Where we digress is I think all is not lost due to the proliferation digital photos, ie Iphone and lets not leave out Samsungs, with Google's Android. I do think the records digitized today will be maintained as long as we have a semblance of a civilized society. To be crass - there is too much money in it.

Phil:chug:
 

MGrayson

Subscriber and Workshop Member
Apple makes it very easy to produce printed books of photos. I can't speak to the archival nature of the results, but they *do* provide a means of getting your pictures into the real world.

Best,

Matt
 

Godfrey

Well-known member
Funny :ROTFL: never thought of myself as "Photographic Elite" nor partaking of utopian propaganda. ..
Nor I. Some of my most treasured photos are friends and family.
They are going into books which, while not saleable, will be printed and distributed so that there's a future for those that might cherish them.

(I have been making*small books through iPhoto since the service was available. It's great for some books that you want to distribute to family and friend. They seem to hold up well so far. And if you want to preserve them in the Library of Congress, register them before printing, create a page with the identification and copyright info, and send them a digital or physical copy for archiving. Immortality can be yours. ;-)

G
 

Ben Rubinstein

Active member
Marc is correct however, there is a huge untapped market out there for providing a future for the common mans digital records. It will need customer education however and I have a feeling that a large part of the larger corporations goal is to not make people realise how temporary their efforts actually are in the digital realm unless they take specific, annoying and often costly steps. Google would seem to be the prime candidate for this, especially with their project to photograph the worlds books and make them available online (copyright issues aside). Would be a huge money maker too.

It is really the cloud I suppose but I just wonder whether giving control over history as it will be perceived 100's of years from now, to governments and large corporations is really the best idea. We have only really begun to undo the damage of the history of the dark ages (or indeed the past few thousand years) being in the hands of those (monarchies and religious groups) far too unobjective to allow it to be taken as fact and that is where there were, albeit few, independant records. Technically the truth of what has actually happened during this generation should be the easiest to piece together given and albeit the vast collection of available information worldwide. Only though if it is curated independently of governments, corporations and interest groups. I would not trust to that if it is they who will be relied on to do the curating just to make sure there will be a record at all. Not centuries from now.
 

fotografz

Well-known member
Yep, you guys are just "awe shucks" common folk snapping away with the only camera you own ... your iPhone. :ROTFL:
 

fotografz

Well-known member
Marc is correct however, there is a huge untapped market out there for providing a future for the common mans digital records. It will need customer education however and I have a feeling that a large part of the larger corporations goal is to not make people realise how temporary their efforts actually are in the digital realm unless they take specific, annoying and often costly steps. Google would seem to be the prime candidate for this, especially with their project to photograph the worlds books and make them available online (copyright issues aside). Would be a huge money maker too.

It is really the cloud I suppose but I just wonder whether giving control over history as it will be perceived 100's of years from now, to governments and large corporations is really the best idea. We have only really begun to undo the damage of the history of the dark ages (or indeed the past few thousand years) being in the hands of those (monarchies and religious groups) far too unobjective to allow it to be taken as fact and that is where there were, albeit few, independant records. Technically the truth of what has actually happened during this generation should be the easiest to piece together given and albeit the vast collection of available information worldwide. Only though if it is curated independently of governments, corporations and interest groups. I would not trust to that if it is they who will be relied on to do the curating just to make sure there will be a record at all. Not centuries from now.
Bingo! Frankly, I didn't even think of Google ... that's an interesting notion.

I think if modern preservation of family photographic records is tied to making hard copies, it'll fail ... let alone Aunt Phoebe making a book and shuttling it off to the Library of Congress ... as if that'd ever happen on a mass scale these days. Delusional "let them eat cake" thinking.

It has to be some very easy method ... perhaps an App that you just tap and that delightful pic of a sleeping Uncle Marvin who's face was painted by his nieces, automatically goes into the family Cloud photo vault. If it already exists, then it needs to be better promoted.

I've come to accept that photography has largely become democratic ... but it needs to be preserved to finish the task ... and most certainly not by Governments or institutions with an agenda.

I had an interesting insight when photographing a 1 year old baby for a previous wedding client. Yes, I could do a beautiful couple of shots, but it was a crap shoot whether the baby was in the mood. On the other hand the couple is there boots on the ground all the time, with a photo devise at hand all the time ... there's no way to compete with that. It'd be a greater service to them to spend an hour showing them how to compose an image and helping them set up a way to keep the images.

- Marc
 
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