Comment The digiphoto problem is true for newspapers (Score 2, Insightful) 479
I work for a medium-sized newspaper in Finland. At least there disappearance of archives is true.
First of all, usually the photographers send just a couple of pictures to the newsdesk. They've gone through the 128 MB selection of pictures, select maybe a dozen, then cut that down to two or three, edit them into shape and pass them on.
Then they erase rest of the photos. Short-sighted, maybe, but they simply don't have time or resources to save every one of those shots. At least with film you always got the pictures.
Then there's the archive. Not all the pictures that are passed on to the newsdesk are necessarily saved. They have to be commented, checked and so on.
I don't know how they coped with this a couple of years back when shooting film. Probably the same way they did with the news stories - the archives weren't that sophisticated, and maybe not even as complete.
But at least they were there.
It is easy for someone who doesn't shoot pictures for a living five days a week, sometimes doing 12-hour days, to say that digital storage is cheap and all the pictures should be saved.
When you're a news photographer, the cost and capacity of the medium is somewhat unimportant. It's all the other stuff that contributes to less digital photos being stored.
First of all, usually the photographers send just a couple of pictures to the newsdesk. They've gone through the 128 MB selection of pictures, select maybe a dozen, then cut that down to two or three, edit them into shape and pass them on.
Then they erase rest of the photos. Short-sighted, maybe, but they simply don't have time or resources to save every one of those shots. At least with film you always got the pictures.
Then there's the archive. Not all the pictures that are passed on to the newsdesk are necessarily saved. They have to be commented, checked and so on.
I don't know how they coped with this a couple of years back when shooting film. Probably the same way they did with the news stories - the archives weren't that sophisticated, and maybe not even as complete.
But at least they were there.
It is easy for someone who doesn't shoot pictures for a living five days a week, sometimes doing 12-hour days, to say that digital storage is cheap and all the pictures should be saved.
When you're a news photographer, the cost and capacity of the medium is somewhat unimportant. It's all the other stuff that contributes to less digital photos being stored.
