Do Digital Photos Endanger History?

Ant writes "Experienced photographer Jayne West wrote her degree dissertation on the historical impact of digital capture. She argues that the use of digital photography in news reporting means we could lose a valuable pictorial record of history." Much of her argument seems weak to me (precisely because digital photography allows the instant culling West talks about). The digital storage itself, though, perhaps ought to make us nervous.

Re:Flawed arguments

Yes, but if you run out of storage you can cull useless images to free up memory. No wasted shots.
All that's really is a standard for permanent storage.

Paper????

By the gods! How can you write anything important on paper? It will be lost to history. You need to carve your work on large stone slabs so it won't deteriorate over time. Anything else is unconscienable.

Easily solved

It's seems like the majority of her argument lies on the lack of storage space on memory cards. Two easy solutions:

1) Get bigger memory cards. You can't take as many pictures on a 12 exposure roll as you can on a 36. Common sense.

2) Get more cards. Your photographer won't get enough shots if he only brought one roll of film, so why are you sending him out with one memory card.

Both these problems exist in traditional photography, just in slightly different forms.

Regardless, memory cards are getting bigger and cheaper. This is only a problem in the short term.

Re:Easily solved

That's 9 36-exposure rolls

...which isn't much at all for news shooter. Those guys crank through film. It's not like they buy it at the Rite Aid -- they get those shrink-wrapped blocks of what, 20 or 25 rolls? "Film is cheap, shots are expensive."

Point is that with film there was no choice in the matter. With 35mm film, nobody is going to develop just the good frames, and it's not even worth cutting the bad ones out of the strip. They stay in the archive because there's no reason to remove them -- you can't reuse the medium anyway.

Digital media are reusable, and will be reused as soon as there's an issue. Even if the media were free and weightless, shooters would still edit and make room just in case another shot comes along.

Re:Easily solved

True. Let's throw it open to the people: who here has deleted a digital image? And who here has snipped out a particular frame from a roll and thrown it away?

See what I mean? You don't edit 35mm film, because there's absolutely no benefit (unless it's that one of you with the sheep or something.) Once you've shot the frame, you keep it, because it's more trouble to cut it out and discard it then it is to hang on to it. You can't reuse it, so you retain it. You might toss a whole roll, but not any specific frame.

Digital media might encourage you to shoot more, just as 35mm Leicas encouraged more frames than 4x5 Speed Graphics (and strobes vs. those insanely hot flashbulbs -- those guys must have had asbestos pockets, or just left a trail of fused glass everywhere they went), but they also encourage editing and discard. Hell, you can see it mentioned in the advertising for digital cameras.

There is a coment somewhere in this discussion that suggested little CD-R's. That would probably cover both ends of the problem.

Re:Easily solved

I see two pieces of the problem. As discussed, the first issue is storage capacity. The second factor is ease of editing. I think #2 is where we will lose more images.

The storage capacity issue is easy to address. A film photographer carries several rolls of film. A digital photographer can carry more or larger memory cards. There's no reason a digital photographer can't take and keep hundreds of pictures if necessary.

I suspect the problem really begins once the photographer gets back to the office. He may have been too busy to do editing in the field, but he might take the time once he gets back. If he doesn't, his editor might. Maybe they have a librarian that manages their archive. The point is, someone in the office will ultimately decide what is kept and what is deleted.

This is the big difference compared to film. In the world of film, it's customary to file the whole roll of negatives. It's a lot easier than picking through each roll and clipping individual frames, plus the film is easier to handle and store if it's kept in strips.

Storage cost with film isn't really a big issue either. Because of the way film is organized and stored, you don't save much storage space by clipping frames. It can even take more space than filing complete strips. By default, unless you decide that every frame on the roll is junk, you will probably keep everything.

In the digital world, the opposite is often true. Someone has to decide which images to archive. The rest are deleted. Of course you can archive all of the image files, but there's little practical reason to do so. Why bother when it's so easy to pick the ones you want?

And, unlike film, storage costs are an issue for digital images. There can be a direct increase in storage costs for keeping everything vs. selecting a few images. If your custom is to store each shoot on a separate CD, then keeping everything isn't an issue. If you're using online storage or consolidating multiple sessions on a single piece of media, then culling your work saves money.

I'm concerned that just giving digital photographers more/bigger memory cards won't help the problem. We really need a commitment to archive all of the images taken. Then we can worry about finding a digital medium that we can still use in 100 years.

what actually happens .....

I work in the media world and this is what actually happens...

EVERY shot unless it is blurred or horribly under or over exposed is kept on record. Every digital tape we shoot with our digital betacam cameras is stored and kept with no death date. I have a room full of 3/4" video tapes that has footage from 1980's and we have another storage facility with 1" video reels from the 70's. Today? we store digitally on DVD's and last year fits in a drawer (and has 3 times the amount of video shot.)

Why? because that is the way it is done.. and my fun is writing software to keep track of it all :-)

The problem lies with the fact that we cannot read the 1" video reels anymore. we do have 1 or 2 3/4 decks around but who knows where they are in 30 years. what about in 700 years? who will be able to read the video from the DVD's? Format change is the only threat to information, printouts or actual paper photos can be viewed in 30,000 years while the DVD will require the archeologist to build a dvd reader to gain access to the contents.

Not Really...

If you compare it to traditional photography, not really; there are newspapers with archives of photos which are rotting right now because no one maintains them. Even if they do make an effort to preserve them, the storage space requirements for traditional photos get pretty hefty after a while, too.

Cave painting, on the other hand, lasts at least tens of thousands of years, so if you REALLY want to preserve your history, I suggest you find a cave and paint in it with some yaks blood. Maybe you can modify slashcode for a cave edition (First posts stored for 10,000 years. Yeah...)

Not cave painting, but a durable approach:

Cave painting, on the other hand, lasts at least tens of thousands of years, so if you REALLY want to preserve your history, I suggest you find a cave and paint in it with some yaks blood.

Or silkscreen using oxide pigments on to fiberglass cloth, and fire it to diffuse the oxides into the silica.

This will be as durable as any other form of quartz as far as fire, cold, water, and chemical attack are concerned, and would be reasonably resistant to physical wear if it was treated with respect.

A raging inferno would still melt the glass. A hot fire would cause the pigments on adjacent pages in a glass-cloth book to blend into each other, too. You can reduce this problem by using corundum fibers (aluminum oxide) and oxides that don't diffuse very quickly. This would take sustained forge-fire to destroy (corundum melts at over 2000 degrees centigrade, and is harder *and* more resistant to chemical attack than quartz).

I've been meaning to test this with a blowtorch, a patch of fiberglass fabric, and some rust powder for a while now. They're all about 30 feet from me; I just haven't bothered yet.

Problems are drawing/writing resolution, lack of a really nice range of pigment colours, and (for corundum) producing the cloth (corundum is a lot harder to spin into fibers than glass; I'm told that it doesn't go through the same "mushy" stage glass does).

Real issue: This woman needs more storage.

With the proper amount of data storage, there would be no need to do "on site editing" and with proper data transmission capabilities, the collected pictures could be sent to home base in an endless stream to a massive data storage server where they could be archived forever.

My major issue with digital photography is that it can be copied without degradation. However, as long as photographers stenographically sign their pictures, it'll be easy to tell if the exact copy of that picture was used. On the other hand, an altered copy might prove more difficult to track down without tenacious visual inspection

No point in relating my ideas here.

If you look on the same page, after the article, the readers of that site have already raised all the valid points in defense of the technology. There is no point in repeating what was said but here is a summary of the most important points in my view:
-Digital media is evolving so that storage capacity soon becomes obsolete
- Film is harder and more expensive to backup that digital media.
-You can take a lot more pictures without having to change memory cards that with conventional film (considering the standard is about 64 mbs per card and a full resolution jpg 2048*1536 32 bit at 1/4 compression is about 900k), thus allowing more time to take pistures instead of changing film.
- easier to print to newspapers since it has to be digitized anyway to get there.
- and more....

The real danger

Is the digital storage itself, maybe?

What I've observed is, digital technologies tend to become obsolete and forgotten.

At least, pictures stored on film or microfilm can be directly seen by the eyes. Digitally stored, we have to decrypt, decompress, change into analog form...etc before the information can be truely "read".

We are able to study scripts written as far as 4000 years ago. Any sane mind here thinks our digital stuffs can last even one tenth as long?

She's concerned with good reason ...

The ability to instantly cull photos that digital photography allows might just result in the loss of a significant portion of our pictorial history. Some of the greatest photojournalistic coups of all time were accidental ... things caught in the background of a photo that were only discovered on later examination ... many of these priceless records would have been lost if the pics they were found in could have been trashed instantly because "the light isn't right" or the composition sucks.

As for concern about digital-only storage, this concern is well-founded too. How do you recover the data when readers for the media are no longer available? Seen any 8" floppies lately? How about 5.25"? The cost of transferring terabytes of archives to new media has cost the loss of literally TONS of data. Film (preferably black and white, or separations on black and white film) is the ONLY suitable medium for archiving image data.

Digital Storage vs. Print Storage

When I take a digital photo, it goes on a Sony Memory-stick. I copy it over to CDR.

The average lifespan of a CD is about 20 years. Slightly less if you use CDR.

We still have some of the very first photos taken, about 150 years ago... around the time of the end of the civil war. They're in pretty bad shape however. The ones that are best preserved are kept in airtight storage. Nobody ever gets to look at them. Only their copies... And with each successive analogue copy, even with the most loving attention to preserving the quality of the original, a little is lost.

Twenty years from now, if I'm dilligent, I can copy all my CDR to Super-DVDR or whatever. I'll have perfect digital copies of everything I kept before... if I was dilligent and made backups in case of fire, etc.

Twenty years from now, the only format we'll be able to see most of the ancient photos we have will be digital. Those who own them will no doubt be dilligent in making sure both the originals and the digital copies are kept secure one way or the other.

Fifty Years from now, I can make copies of my Super-DVDR to Quantum Storage, or something similiar.

Fifty Years from now, those ancient photos will still reside in a digital format, probably alongside my digital photos.

Even when the copies of the copies have broken down, if we're careful and follow data saftey and purity rules, we'll still have digital versions of
*all* the photos. The question you have to ask yourself is that digital storage the wave of the future, but can we, as a historically-minded society, be dilligent enough to make sure that our data is always secure?

Off-site backups on the moon, anyone?

Re:Digital Storage vs. Print Storage

Sure - you should be able to make perfect digital copies, or even make ternary or quadrany copies... But who's going to have the reader to interpret those bits? Unless you keep that CD of Photoshop or Gimp backed up, with a CPU that can run it - you may have to re-write your own program to interpret the binary and display it as an image.

The oldest image format I can find is 'PIC' which was used by PC Paint in 1984, right around the time PC's could start representing image data on their screens. ACDsee, Photoshop, Gimp, and Irfanview still all support this format, even though it is
horribly limited, and very nearly 20 years old.

Even before that, people have been trading ASCII-style art since the invention of the Teletype. Sure, it's not supported by most graphic programs, because you only need a text editor to view it.

One of the most popular formats for a long time was 'PCX', which was created by Zsoft in 86, I beleive. PCX format later became Microsoft BMP format. The two are fairly similiar in construction, except that BMP's are not limited to 8 bit color. A lot of webmasters still use Gif87 despite the fact that PNG is better in many ways. No image program I know
of does not support Gif87 in one way or another. (Gimp users can download those illegal plugins, remember.)

Today, you can represent an image in more detail than the human eye can see with a 24 bit image. You can print it out how ever large you want it, assuming you have a large enough lens to capture it, and enough disk space to store the pixels. Then you can choose to compress it either losslessly or lossy. We've pretty much hit the end of the road for image file formats. Their may be more formats that come along in the future that compress better or have special features, but you can bet your bottom dollar that common image formats of today will be supported by computer software for decades, if not centuries to come.

By that time, who would want to waste time on 2-D non-holographic static images? They'd be boring, you wouldn't be able to taste or smell anything...


Same reason we still look at and keep glass-plate photos of Civil-War Era scenes. It's a look back in history. The only photos we'll have until your holo-photos arrive will be Boring 2-d's. Sure, they may not be as wonderful as a more immersive format, but you can bet that they'll still be a major part of our society's history.

Actually only 5 years

on your CDs. Unless you splurge for the $1.00 CDR silver or gold ones made with the special dyes- those cheap ones you get at compusa at 100 for 20$ won't last 5 years...

And that assumes you don't ever play them or leave them in the light or expose them to exessive heat or excessive humidity and actually remember to back them up and ....

Senseless

Typical old-school elitism, pure and simple. There is nothing about digital photography that makes it fundamentally different from film.

When you shoot traditional stills, you shoot rolls of film and there are a series of pictures taken while you wait for the news to happen.

Sequential file naming creates a "series" in precisely the same sense.

But, because of storage issues on the camera, he will have to delete some of those images as he goes along.

Oh please. I've got a consumer-grade digital camera that'll shoot over 1000 medium-res pictures without swapping storage. How long ago was this written?

Surely in those circumstances, when only certain photographers are getting access to certain scenes, the more information we have, the better

"Please, please, please, don't let new technology make my entire life's work completely useless! Please continue paying me for my antiquated skills!" Sad.

Luddites 'r' Us

I sincerely hope that this was an undergraduate thesis and not doctoral-level stuff. I sure wouldn't want to have to defend it! :) It seems not only is Ms. West presenting a weak argument, it seems that an application of common sense would suggest the exact OPPOSITE hypotheses to the ones she chose to defend. Allow me...

Issue #1 - But, because of storage issues on the camera, he will have to delete some of those images as he goes along. I know everyone on /. is harping on this for being inaccurate, but I'd go one further. Digital "film", regardless of media type, is SO cheap and so reuseable that the digital photographer takes MORE pictures, not less. Hey, they're free, right? Click click click click click. Argument inverted.

Issue #2 - A whole collection of material, that may well be far more interesting in the months and years after the event than in the hard news context, is being lost at that stage. Lets imagine photographer A is old-school SLR-boy, and he took 1000 pictures of a given news event. Photographer B is techno-girl, with her 7-bazillipixel Sony Megivica. She takes 500 pictures, because she was told by her ill-informed friend Jayne West that she should delete half the ones she takes.

Now imagine this news event turns out to be worthy of going thru the "dud" pictures afterwards. What is more easily examined after the fact - 500 digital pictures (click click zoom zoom enhance enhance hey lets email this to the expert in LA) or 1000 negatives (lets make chemical soup x 1000 and bust out the magnifying glasses)? Even if the hypothesis about "less digital photos remain" holds true (which is preposterous), certainly the accessibility of the digital images more than makes up for it - if a diligent investigator / journalist can access the images from his or her desk or dump them on his or her laptop, then they're ten times more likely to peruse the images for shady stuff in the background. Argument inverted.

Issue #3 - Obviously off-site backup of perfect-copy images is an impossibility in the land of real film, but a nightly automated process in digital film land. Not to mention that optical media and redundant backups means a virtually infinite shelf life, versus the sub-century longevity of developed 35mm film. Argument inverted.

I'm surprised the silly "digital photography means you can't prove faked images" argument wasn't raised by our loom-burning film lover.

Issue #4 - In some ways, it's no different to the invention of the telegraph a 100 odd years ago, when it suddenly became possible to transmit messages over long distances in a very short space of time.

This is RUBBISH. A telegraph was ephemeral - a transmission and a disposable record of the message sent. Digital photography opens the doors to PERFECT, archival of INFINITE DURATION (with refreshing and conversion to current media, all of which is lossless). Could a worse example have been chosen? She could have compared it to the invention of the electic can opener and been less out to lunch.

Issue #5 - We don't have the build-up, we don't have the aftermath, we don't have incidental shots of who was there. Au contraire, mon ananas. If you're reloading every 24/36 shots, you're taking a lot less incidental shots than if your camera will hold 200+ images. Not to mention those cameras that permit the recording of simple video and/or audio in case all hell breaks loose. Would that not provide more build-up, more aftermath, and more incidental shots?

I could go on but I guess a lot of this is pretty obvious. Strange day on /. today - I'm surprised I didn't have to pay to download the PDF from BBC! :)

Don't change the photographer/editor relationship

The long-term issue caused by the movement to digital cameras by the journalism world (especially fast turnaround publications like daily newspapers) is not storage or archiving. These are inconveniences that will be settled with the advancement of technology and time. While CaseyB [slashdot.org] might be able to get a few more images on his consumer digital than a professional journalist using a Nikon D1H [nikonusa.com], I agree that these are not the important issues.
The real change that digital cameras have brought to journalism has nothing to do with what's inside the camera, but what's on the outside: the preview window. Before digital cameras (and scanners in the situation of photographers that processed film on-site and then transmitted), most photojournalists didn't see the results of their shooting until it appeared in the paper the next day. Because his images were being recorded into a 'black box' the photographer was always forward thinking - trying to get the best image from the subject in front of him. Giving the photographer the power to see what they had just produced suddenly put the photographer in the editing chair, and gave him the power to judge whether an image was newsworthy. With a push of the 'trash can' button, the image was lost forever.
Shooting and editing are fundamentally different challenges. I've been in both shoes before and they require very different skill sets and motivations. Editors are responsible for representing the intent of the story, as well as trying to find the best image. Because these tasks aren't mutually exclusive, an image that the photographer might have considered unusable (because it was slightly out of focus, poorly composed, underexposed, etc.), could be the perfect choice if it does a good job of 'telling the story' despite its flaws. So, while it is true that 'infinite' storage in the future will elimintate the need for the photographer to delete any images, it won't get rid of the photographer's new role as pre-editor.
Probably my favorite example of a situation where shooting on film created an unexpected timeless image was shot by Dirck Halstead, a veteran Time photographer. He shot the famous Monica Lewinsky hugging Bill Clinton photograph. At the time he shot the image, Monica was an unknown intern that happened to receive a warm hug from Bill at an event on the White House lawn. There were a lot of photographers present, but Dirck was one of the only ones shooting film. When the scandal broke a few months later, Dirck had the feeling that he had seen her face before, so Time hired a researcher to dig in his archives and find the image. The image was found, and Dirck was the only one that got the shot despite their being many other photographers there -- other photographers, all shooting digital. Many of them probably shot that image, but who would save an image of the President hugging an unknown person?

A more reasonable concern

Well, these days you can write a history thesis on just about anything....

As a professional historian, I actually think the greater potential impact of digital media on the historical record lies in it's vulnerability. Those who have undertaken the task of "rewriting history" to fit a particular agenda or world view in the past faced a profound obstacle: the existance of the physical record. Burning books, destroying documents, and manufacturing evidence took a lot of energy on the part of the Soviets & the Nazis [ and lots of others ]. Will electronic documentation have the same persistence that the physical record had? Or will the tyrant-de-jour simply order the re-creation of the historical record by virtue of a well-constructed worm? You'll recall the industry of historical revision in Brave New World. Hmmm... interesting, but I won't lose sleep over it.

Digital manipulation more a threat

A lot of been handling the "paper media doesn't last as long as digital media" argument, so I won't touch it. More to the point, though, I think digital manipulation is a much bigger threat to valid records as a whole. Tonight's most egregious event: the World Series, with Fox's omnipresent digitally-created banner behind the batter, on the tarmac wall. It was not only:

- Distracting
- Only in some shots
- And deceitful

it was also poorly done. The artists made an effort to "rough up" the banner to make it match the video taped shots but it was quite obviously faked. Fox's "laser puck" experiment with the NHL was more real.

Further, any time a future generation wants to watch my taped version of the World Series, they will have to contend with looking at something that brings about the "what were they thinking" factor. Heaven forbid years from now, when some archeologist digs up a VHS player (just watched Cowboy Bebop earlier this week -- forgive me) and the viewer actually thinks the banner was real.

This started in earnest with the millenium celebrations, but I'm more disturbed by this beginning to affect everyday sporting events. What's next? On my way into work, billboards "Gatored" with multiple layers of holigrammed video?

She's right, at least in part

One example, as related to me by John Shaw [johnshawphoto.com], a well known nature photographer.

The well-known shot of Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton hugging at some convention? I think it was captured on video as well. But the one (out of dozens) of still photographers that caught it, and the one that had their picture published all over the world? It was shot on film. All the other press photographers in attendance at that event were shooting digital cameras (digital is now quite prevelant in photojournalism, in large part because of the short turn around time for processing and transmission, but also because quality doesn't matter nearly as much as timeliness). At the time, Monica Lewinsky was a nobody, one of dozens of White House interns.

All the photographers shooting with digital thought: "ah, a nothing shot" and deleted it. When the story broke and the shit hit the fan, who was the one still photographer who had a shot of this? The one shooting on film.

As a nature photographer, digital isn't there yet. Never mind the resolution, etc., but if you're in the jungles of Borneo, or amongst the penguins in Antarctica, or wherever for an extended period, it's still a heck of a lot easier to schlep a bunch of film than a bunch of memory cards, and to know that it will more or less stand up to the conditions.

Many professional photographers have more than one camera body, sometimes for different films, but mostly for backup. If you're on an important shoot, you need backup. If you're shooting with a film camera, that's easy. If you're shooting with digital, that means some way of backing up your memory cards. Which generally means a laptop. Which if you're serious and/or off the beaten path, means you take a backup for it, too. Starting to get the picture?

I'm not saying that digital photography is the problem behind of all this. But the number of photographs that on film that are viewable now from 100 years ago, vs. the number that are shot on digital and will be viewable 100 years from now is probably not comparable. If you find a trunk of old photos from 100 years ago, you'll probably at least go through it once. If you find an old CD 100 years from now, you might think "huh! How quaint! It's like one of those old 45s my grandpa talked about". And those photos will probably never be seen again.

Re:She's right, at least in part

I could take a picture of a sports game with a regular camera and think to myself "aw it's a nothing shot" and set it and it's negative on fire in an ashtray.

The point is that very few people do burn their negatives.

In my closet, I have stereo slides taken in the '50s by my dad from before he met my mother. I also have most of the negatives from my childhood, and thousands of negatives that I've shot since then. Negatives are relatively compact, and easy to store for a couple of decades (longer than that and you should be explicitly nice to them).

What we're dealing with in this digital vs film case is the default path for the 'uninteresting' pictures. With film, the photographer would drop of a bag of film rolls at the processing lab, and the editor would get a stack of negatives, chose one (or a few) and be done with it.

In this case, you now have, besides the one or two printed pictures, another dozen or hundred that didn't make the grade, today. For the most part, these pictures cannot be reused, but it is pretty easy to put the spare pictures in a book and stick it on a shelf for a few years.

With digital, a couple of 'bad' pictures (like the picturs of clinton with 'that intern chick') might get culled before it even made it to the editorial desk. The images that aren't used, on the other hand, are on a $200 hard disk that is very reusable. One click of the mouse, and you once again have space for another 300 images.

Most consumers don't realize the quantity of film that a news photographer can go through. You don't count frames. You count rolls. If a news photographer tells you that he's got 3 rolls left, he's not bragging. He's probably worrying.

BTW: At 3Meg each, someone mentioned that his camera has room for 330 images (~ 9 rolls). This is about the number of pictures that I'll take at a friend's wedding. I'm not a news photographer, but I go through film like one. (must come from volunteering for community newspapers). A 20 GB drive wouldn't store a busy year's worth of my pictures at decent resolution. Then I would have to decide if I'm gonna try and fit another 20GB drive in my box or cull most of the pictures.
Listen to the sound of file pointers being zeroed

The real threat of digital media...

...is not just what might be lost to deletion. In terms of raw storage space, a 650MB CD-R has a bookshelf full of books, boxes, negatives, etc. beat hands-down. The real problems that I see with digital storage have nothing to do with the longevity of the data itself. There are several issues that have great bearing on the preservation of history when it comes to digital media, however.

One of the biggest issues is the *accessibility* of the data. Anyone who can see is capable of looking at a hundred year old photograph. Most fairly literate adults would be capable of reading (or at least puzzling out) a written document that dates back dozens or even hundreds of years. You have to go back many centuries before you require more than a good knowledge of the current language and a strong light source in order to read someone's old letters, and even then, all it takes is an education in the proper language of the period. No special tools required; just the proper knowledge.

With digital media, this is no longer the case. No human I know of is capable of reading a CD-R by eye. To access data stored in this fashion, you need a computer with the proper hardware and software. At this time, this presents no problem; few computers today come without CD-ROM drives, and you'd be hard-pressed to find someone with absolutely no access to one. But that may not be the case tomorrow. Ten years from now, CDs may be obsolete (sooner, if the RIAA has it's way...), and then it will be hard to find a machine that can read one, except in the workshop of some computer hobbyists. In twenty years, the number of people with access to an obsolete medium will be very small. In fifty years, it would be virtually impossible to find someone with equipment that can access the data. In a hundred years, few, if any, ordinary people will even know what the hell a CD is, much less know what to do with it. Think about it...how many of you out there could access data on an 8" disk? How many of you know someone who might be able to? I'd guess the numbers are relatively few, and this is a technology that, relatively speaking, is not all that old. And that was a common format. What about people who are storing data on less common media, like LS-120 disks or JAZ drives? Anyone around here have a drive that can read a flopticle? An optical disc? I was using those myself to store data just six or seven years ago in high school, but I'd be hard pressed now to find the hardware and software to read them.

Another problem that occurs, and is related to what Ms. West wrote, is the transitory nature of everyday electronic communication. Personal communications like letters are perhaps one of the best windows into the everyday life of people who lived long ago. Today, though, email and voicemail have replaced letters as the predominant form of communication. While this is great in terms of speed and efficiency, it also lacks the longevity of a handwritten letter. Many people saved old letters for years, and kept them in the family. Most people I know don't even save their emails for a week before they're consigned to the void. I'm an obsessive-compulsive pack rat who doesn't throw anything away, so I have email that dates back six years and three computer systems, but I am far from normal in that regard...and in ten or fifteen years, chances are very good that I'll lose all of that mail somewhere along the way. And when email is lost, it isn't buried in a long-forgotten box in a dusty attic somewhere, waiting for someone to stumble on it one day in the future. When email is "lost," it's gone for good. The chances of any personal email communication (barring spam, famous chain letters, etc.) lasting more than ten years are slim to none. Use of "snail mail" for personal communication has declined sharply in recent years, as people move to email and other forms of electronic communication. Stuff like the current anthrax scares will only make more and more people turn to electronic communication as a safer, cheaper, faster alternative. But as they do, the trail of personal information they leave for future generations becomes smaller and smaller. A hundred years from now, our descendants will know far less about us than we know about those who celebrated the dawn of the 1900s. The effective lifetime of the records we leave behind has shrunk significantly, from centuries to decades, or even mere years. It's kind of scary when you realize that in fifty years, such an enourmous chunk of what defines this time period will likely be gone without a trace. The more we move to electronic communication as a way of life, the larger that chunk will be. One day, we may have no history except that which is passed down directly from generation to generation...much like the days before written language was invented. Strange thought, isn't it?

DennyK

She's wrong: a real life experience detailed here.

She had a valid opinion 3 years ago, but not now.

About a year ago, I stopped shooting film when I purchased a Canon D30 digital SLR body. Since then I have shot close to 20,000 images. I have -ALL- of them, and I have *NEVER* deleted an image off my IBM Microdrive, even when on the road for weeks at a time. This person probably does not own or work with the latest storage and camera technologies.

Here's how it works:
When I bought the D30 I also bought the IBM 1GB Microdrive. At Fine quality JPEG setting, the microdrive will hold about 800 photos, or more if they have large areas of undetailed sky or backdrop. I went to Japan and England this year. In both places, I shot between 200 and 400 images PER DAY. When I got back to the hotel/motel each night, I pulled out my laptop and dumped all the days' images onto the laptop and erased them off the Microdrive. After I got home I transferred them to my personal computer, where they now live. If I need more room I buy a new hard drive. We all know how cheap they are. Backups are also performed on removable hard drives and stored offsite. I don't use most of those images, but I am always coming back to them and finding more things. 20 years from now I will be laughing at the old cars and bad 90's fashion and will find interesting details in the most mundane of photos. Or perhaps many of the places I have shot will be destroyed by a world war. Who knows?

Lets say you are doing images for large blow-ups or profiled printing and you need to make sure you have no artifacts and a full color gamut. So you shoot in RAW or TIFF format. The microdrive will hold 1/3 of the photos than in JPEG format. Solution? Buy one or two more microdrives, and you still have enough to shoot like a madman in the course of a day. I am not sure what this person is trying to get at. Any lack of space can only be due to not being able to afford flashcards or microdrives.

Also, many other people have already covered the fact that digital photos, when transfered properly across mediums to ensure readability, don't degrade over time, unlike film, and are infinitely more accessable and searchable. I agree with some others here that it is a very luddite opinion to have. There are definitely precautions that must be taken with digital files to be sure they will last (backups, etc) and in the end they will long outlast film.

---Mike
(see my Britain travelogue and photos here. [mikemassee.com])

Editors should read the story.

Slashdot editors should re-read the story instead of making out of hand comments.

West is _not_ criticizing the images that actually get published. She is criticizing all that get deleted. You don't go ahead and save every image you take to your harddrive, as you then have to buy a new harddrive all the time. Its much more convenient to just delete what you think is irrelevant at the moment.

With a film that is not possible. The film stores it, at least "semi-permanent", that is, at least a couple of years or 20.
Of course, you get a buttload of film to handle, and someone needs to review all that film, but thats beside the point.
The point is that she worries that history get lost, due to all the deletion of material. She would NOT be worried, if every journalist/photographer just saved _everything_ to harddrives, and never deleted any pictures. _Then_ she, according to her article, would be perfectly happy with it (she doesn't say so, but its obvious out of her article).

Comments from one who worked at a newspaper...

I worked for the Columbus Dispatch in Columbus, Ohio as an intern in the photography department.

This article, while brining up a few interesting points about digital and how it may or could change things, what I actually saw and was a part of painted a different picture, but this may be only unique to this one newspaper.

The photographers were all armed with Canon EOS digitals, I had my own Olympus E-10 and some had the new Nikon D1X, which is quite possibly the greatest digital camera to ever exist.

Anyway, most had 256 MB CF cards or in the case of the Canon digitals, several GB PCMCIA drives which could hold thousands of full quality, often times RAW (uncompressed) pictures. Those with CF cards could hold about 40 raw pictures per CF, or around 200 1/2.8 JPEGs (still very high quality). The best part of all is we could share the cards, so if one didn't need 50 MB on their card and someone else did, we could use their card. Try doing that with a half exposed roll of film.

Most of us shot in high quality JPEG, because you couldn't tell the difference between that and raw if you didn't magnify the image 5x. This saved space, which is still valuable, and affored us the quality we needed for front page spreads.

When we would finish a shoot, we would save all the digital images on CD. The film guys, on the other hand, would throw away the negatives that didn't make the cut. There was simply no place to put them and the care and cost of chemicals required to maintain them was too expensive. However, all our images were backed up on CDs and filed in a safe. Pure, digital copies of our work. In other cases we would have a laptop on site and would simply slide our CF in with a PCMCIA adapter and in 5 minutes have 200 more shots ready.

I think the situation this woman speaks of is that like the early days of digital, when you were limited to $250 32 MB cards. However, today a 320 MB CompactFlash card can be had for under $100, and a 1 GB micro-drive is around $400. I rarely think a photographer brings enough film for 3500+ pictures on one shoot, which one could fit on a microdrive with a small laptop (over 100 roles of film). Plus, the 2 GB and 5 GB microdrive versions are just on the horizon, offering even more on field capacity.

In fact, if anything, the cheapness of digital makes photographers take more pictures. Lets not forget the time factor. There is NO developing, no scanning, etc. You can take a laptop and even transfer the images back by modem if needed, or plug into the nearest network. And today, when all layout is done on computers, this just makes sense.

I think this woman tried digital when it was in its infancy and backed away from it and now has a film only attitude. Well, she should really try the Nikon D1X SLR and a 1 GB microdrive. I think she'll be leaving film for good when she gets some of the images from that camera (which technically has greater resolution and dynamic range than a 35 MM negative).

Even my Olympus E-10, a prosumer model, rivals film to the point where the images from the camera are sharper than any scans I can get from a 35 MM negative.

Also, there was something mentioned about the durability of film vs. digital. Well, may I remind you that film cannot be kept in hot temperatures. This is why people refrigerate their film (before and after exposure). Digital has no problems in hot weather, albeit the CCD does produce more noise when the temperature rises, it doesn't completly fade away the picture like film would. In the cold, dew forms on film negatives and moisture damage is a huge problem. With digital this isn't a problem at all, and most CCDs perform better in the cold.

The best part about digital is that its a growing field. It follows Moore's law, and in five years we could be looking at over 20 mega-pixels of resolution at all types of ISOs (film has only one ISO while the D1X can go from 100-800 by pressing a button), greater than medium format and rivaling large format. This is greater resolution than 35 MM will ever be able to provide.

All through that women's article I find it odd no one has mentioned she is attacking digital archival. She seems to think digital will reduce the nation's photographic libraries, when other mediums, such as print, etc. have been the poster child for digital archival and everyone is so glad the old days of microfilm and paper are over. In fact, digital archival for photographs is easily suited for the task. It's much easier to query a database for "September 11th 2nd Plane" than look through an entire seleve of negatives, or go through a convoluted filing system. When I worked, all digital images would have to have a title, a description, where it was taken, and the identity of anyone pictured (if not a crowd shot). This is what we would do after we get back. The embedded EXIF data in the image, as recorded by the camera, took care of the date, ISO, shutter speed, and other technical information (again, not present with film). This would then go onto an online storage and retreival system, and backed up on CD.

Now as for being an on-site editor, as someone mentioned, and having different goals, this just simply isn't true. An editor and a photographer both have the same goal: getting a good picture. When the photographer arrives back, often times there simply are no *really* good pictures to choose from (you know the feeling of "This one's good enough, go with it."). However, with digital's instant preview of a captured image, a photographer can instantly gauge his efforts and dynamically adjust his shooting style based upon his output. He can progressivly work to attain a greater image by building upon the one he just took, which is impossible with film. This is what we did at an event, and since we were editing on site, we had the benefit to go and take more pictures. Back in the film room with a magnifying glass you are only limited to the selection of what was took -- in many cases that one picture you "had in mind" was lost forever. However at the scene we have the benefit of doing a reshoot without even having to step foot in a darkroom.

My only current complaint with digital is the time factor. Film is still faster at taking images, while digital sometimes makes you wait while saving and compressing images. This is a temporary problem which will soon be corrected as embedded processors get faster and portable storage write speeds increase. Still, this is one area where film wins. Still though, the two and three second waits of today's professional models are getting very close to what film is capable of and burst mode on many cameras gives good results, especially when you're in the middle of a press mob and you only have a few seconds to snap that picture of your subject -- every frame per second counts.

Now, it seems, film is nearing death and the last survivors are clinging onto it like one would with a sick family member. Digital is here to stay, is growing, and no matter what arguments that woman seems to claim, it's the new way for all types of photography. I sent her an e-mail with a link to the D1X and a copy of this post. I think she's just about to change her mind...

One story sums it up

There is a great story at the end of the PBS series American Photography: A Century of Images. It concerns the infamous Monica Lewinski photograph that "proved" that she had met and known the President to some degree before his denials. It was the one of the two hugging at some Whitehouse event. You probably saw it on the cover of Time (or was it Newsweek?).

Anyway, on the last tape of the series, they interview the photographer who took that photo. He is a crusty sort who insists on using real film and scoffs at digital and the story of the picture fixes his argument, he believes.

When the whole Monica-gate thing went down, he remembered seeing her somewhere before. So he hired an assistant to pour over his contact sheets until she found that picture. Which turned out to be pretty important and earned him a pretty penny in the process.

What he wonders is where all the other pictures are? At the same event there were about 50 other photographers taking the same picture at the same time out of the press area. No one else stepped forward before or since. The difference is that all of those photographers use digital almost exclusively and probably cleared off the photo from their hard drives to make way for potentially more "important" pictures.

You have to consider that a professional photographer in that setting may burn through 8 to 10 rolls of film a day. Thats on the order of 240 to 300 high res pictures a day. You may take over 1000 pictures a week. I don't care how big your hard drive is, you're not going to be able to store everything you take digitally. In my mind, she has a point.

The problem is that history gains relevance through context. That context shifts as new information and associations are made. Some "meaningless" photo today could be catching the future's savior or destroyer. You can't make that judgement until some n day in the future.

Final side note... I found the Lewinski photo story funny considering the big deal made about a similar photo of Clinton (as a boy) meeting Kennedy. The relevance had to wait 20 years to show itself.