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Today's Walls Street Journal has an article about film and digital written by Douglas Gantenbein, a writer and photographer living in Port Townsend, WA.
This link should allow the article to be viewed.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110008086
Regards,
John Bailey
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Please excuse the typo. Of course it should be 'today's Wall Street Journal'.
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Will I make that leap? Not yet.
Well, maybe.
A digi P&S in my coat pocket. A Contessa in the other pocket.
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Dear Mr. Gantenbein,
All told, you seem to have made quite a strong case for sticking with film--- in spite of yourself.
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"According to the Photo Marketing Association, digital cameras are likely to account for 90% of all
cameras sold in 2006."
This sounds like a ridiculously low underestimate to me, certainly for the U.S...
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"We will not have a record of the individual stories that are told by families from one generation to another through pictures," Mr. Federman says. "That is a wealth of human history that will simply be lost."
Noting that the article is discussing 35mm, I can't help thinking back to the beginning of the last century. I recall that our photographic records of the era are either large format or things such as tintypes. 35mm came along later. Now, barely a century later, we may be looking at a time when what future historians will have to remember us by is... large format photographs and alternative process images (tintypes -- Go Calamity Jane! -- calotypes, etc.) Actually, I find that rather amusing in a twisted sort of way. Sorry, I can't help that, I was always over-impressed with symmetry.
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Mike,
I couldn't agree with you more about the symmetry.
You might be interested in an earlier thread on this site started by Tim Atherton regarding the latest issue of Artnews, which deals with current photographic trends. You might also be amused by the author's omission of large format and alternative photographic processes.
The thread is entitled: Contemporary Photographic Boom - digital or B&W?
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That analysis is completely bogus. We don't save negatives or slides ( or CDs) for posterity. We save PRINTS. And they will be around from digital sources just as they were from film.
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I can't remember if I got this off of this site or Apug, so my apologies to uncredited sources, but it still cracks me up whenever people discuss about the longevity issues of digital photos :
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/45122
Mind you, I'm one of apparently 10 folks (fact-checkers note: I counted all of the North America, Europe, Oceania and Asia) under the age of 40 who doesn't have a digital camera. And I recently found a hoard of metal (tintypes?) photos from "the old country" amongst my grandmother's former belongings. These are easily the oldest photos I've seen of my family. And indeed, they were in a shoe box.
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As bad as the "digivangelists" who feel compelled to tell everyone within earshot how bad film was for them, are the wistful, wimpy columnists who combine innacurate information about the "death of film", with the theatrical gesture of throwing rose petals on its grave. The WSJ writer is of the latter type, and he is way below their usual standards.