Film photography, a good business in the future ?

[Greg Miller]

Greg, I think we may be talking at cross purposes here. I'd wouldn't consider putting important data on the type of hardware you're suggesting. For starters, you might like adjust your calculations to include disks that have slightly better performance and are a little more dependable:

HP 600GB 6G SAS 15K rpm LFF (3.5-inch) Quick-release ...
http://h30094.www3.hp.com/product/sk...tno/574758-B21


Best,

Richard

Yes, that's a nice drive. But total overkill for these purposes. You are mostly paying for the 15K RPM as opposed to 7200 RPM - completely unnecessary for this purpose. That drive is used in servers in enterprise data centers very high performance (speed) needs of a data center typically running large databases with thousands of users. Just try to find a workstation that has a SAS 600 controller card.

Again, for the typical photographer on this forum, who might run to backup drive for 10 minutes a day, the drive I suggested is perfectly adequate when used in sets of 3.

If you insist on using the drive you suggested, they you need to compare it to the absolute highest standard for archiving film.

[rdenney]

Now as to storage and archiving ... actually, I do think it is germane. Film is, it seems to me, *relatively* inexpensive to store. I'm uncertain, sometimes, if people realize just how expensive digital storage really is. Leaving aside the cost of power (which isn't negligible) and the cost of the box itself it can be sobering to add up the likely cost of disks over one's working life. I haven't looked into the reliability of disks recently but historically one could only expect a consumer grade disk to last about two years. A server grade disk on the other hand could be expected to last for five years -- at about five times the cost in this part of the world. While it's true that in practice many disks do last longer, one was has to accept the increased risk, which for critical data is unacceptable. And I'm not even going to broach the costs associated with data migration ...

Yes, it's relevant. Much of what we need we'd buy anyway, because of the other needs we have for computing power and storage.

In my home network, I have a network-attached storage unit with RAID mirrored drives. I run automated nightly backups to this device. Thus, my image files are stored on my local drive, and also on two separate redundant drives.

I have also added a BluRay writer to the system, which will allow me to make a BluRay backup of my critical image files (at least) and store that backup in a different location. If I had fast internet service here, I would consider a backup service.

Will anyone maintain any of this when I'm gone? Probably not. My prints might survive, but the image files certainly will not. I think that is also true of my negatives and transparencies, however. I think those will end up in a dumpster and then a landfill. Houses these days are not designed to last generations and the attics are no longer easy places to store things.

Most artist-photographers will be remembered by their actual prints, not by their negatives. Some have destroyed their negatives (Brett Weston being the most famous example), and others weren't famous during their life so that after they died anyone cared. Those few who arranged for their negatives to end up in an archive would have had to have been pretty well-known for any archive to be interested.

Thus, I think it's important to make good prints of our best work. And this is the challenge I do not myself live up to--I just don't have any place to put them and frankly nobody seems to want them.

Yes, it's cheap to store negatives for a long time while we are alive, compared to digital storage. But I'd have that digital storage system I outlined above anyway, for storing professional and financial records, writings, and other things that are difficult to print out. The marginal cost of photo storage for many people is not zero, but it's also not as much as the cost of every piece of equipment we might have.

It's true that many are careless about storage, but that's true with film, too.

Rick "waaaay behind on making prints" Denney

[rdenney]

I may be wrong but I venture to say that anyone purchasing "pictures", excepting those that purchase for purely commercial reasons, also wants "art."

Nah. When people want wedding photos, they want a record for their friends and family (supposing that their friends and family care a lot about that record, which is probably not as true as they think it is), and they want a record for themselves. They will use that record by occasionally pulling it off the shelf and reliving that happy day. The preservation and feeding of their memories is their goal.

They will want the pictures to be competently composed and demonstrate good craft. I try not to confuse art and craft, but I know the distinction is difficult, and the source of many an argument among artists as well as photographers.

Even stuff people buy to put on their walls often falls into that category. They either feed memories (I went to the Grand Canyon and this photo of the Grand Canyon really takes me back) or they feed fantasies (I would really like to go there). Sometimes people buy something because it moves them in some way they can't explain, or because they acknowledge that the work is important, or because they think they'll impress their arty friends, or because doing so is a way to show off to their snobby friends. They might even buy it because they think it will have increasing value as art. We hope that it's mostly the first of these reasons, but we have to recognize that art photography is a tiny piece of photography, and even photography that affects people in a truly artistic way is just a fraction of all that purports to be art photography. It's true with other media as well.

Rick "being realistic" Denney

[rdenney]

You are all missing the point. Who cares about negatives or digital files, make archival prints, thats what photographers do. Do people care about Uncle Earls negatives, no, they care about original Ansel Adams prints. I suggest you incinerate all your negatives and smash all your archival drives sometime before you die. Really, who cares other than you. leave some nice prints behind and the world will be better for them.

None of like to believe that this is true, but I can't find any reason to argue against.

Rick "whose negatives will end up in a dumpster" Denney

[Mark Stahlke]

Don't destroy your negatives. You probably don't know which shots have historic value.

A friend of mine is fascinated by Arctic and Antarctic explorers. He recently acquired a couple of negatives from the 1930s. One is a 4x5 showing Byrd in his snow cat. The other is a pano of one of Byrd's ships in a harbor taken by a no-name amateur who happened to be in the right place at the right time.

[Brian Ellis]

None of like to believe that this is true, but I can't find any reason to argue against.

Rick "whose negatives will end up in a dumpster" Denney

Exactly. I don't know who other than pros and high-end amateurs worries about keeping negatives for any length of time (and the high-end amateurs are mostly deluding themselves if they think anyone will care when they're gone but that's another subject). I have well over a thousand prints, mostly family, from the late 1800s through the 1970s. There isn't one single negative in the bunch. Some of my cousins have lots of other family prints. They don't have a single negative either. I'm sure the negatives from which all those prints were made were very "archival." But since they were thrown away somewhere along the line what difference does it make?

A digital image on a disc or an external hard drive might not be kept either. But it at least has a better chance than boxes and boxes of negatives just because it takes up so little space and is easy to store and take along when someone moves. Sure, they may have to be updated as technology changes and blah blah blah.

It seems to me that either digital or film is equally "archival" (whatever that term means) as long as someone cares enough to worry about it. The only difference is in the methodology.

[Steve Smith]

For images we really want to last forever, we should print them out and get Bob Dylan to paint them.



Steve.

[Mark Stahlke]

It seems to me that either digital or film is equally "archival"...

I respectfully disagree. Digital files are more fragile than film or prints. Corrupt a few bytes of an image file and the whole file is probably useless. By contrast, a negative or print with a few scratches or fingerprints is still quite usable.

Brian, how many of those old family photos have scratches, creases, torn corners, or fingerprints?

[Rory_5244]

^ Great examples there, Mark! (Referring to the explorers examples, that is)

[Marko]

Digital files are more fragile than film or prints. Corrupt a few bytes of an image file and the whole file is probably useless.

I'll see your Fragile, Probably" and "Corrupt a few bytes" and raise you my CRC and Checksum.