Film photography, a good business in the future ?

[Marko]

Ever managed a large disk farm?

Yes, actually, I have. That was a part of my job for quite some time.

Ever have multiple concurrent disk failures? It's painful. Thank God for tape backups.

[...]

I've never lost any image files but I have experienced many total and partial media failures. From floppy disks gone bad to the above mentioned disk array failure

The conversation was about file corruption that you mentioned, not media failure. Media security is a very different animal from data security. Let's not confuse the two, shall we?

So, you have never lost an image due to file corruption. I didn't think so.

Here is some 70 year old color film for your enjoyment. Disclaimer: I have no idea how this film was stored or what manner of analog or digital restoration work was done to it.

If you have no idea how it was stored, maintained or possibly restored, what is the point of bringing it up?

[Mark Stahlke]

Marko, most file corruption is a result of partial media failure.

The main reason I linked to those interesting 70 year old photos was to share them with the folks here as penance for my role in causing this thread to drift off topic.

[Marko]

Marko, most file corruption is a result of partial media failure.

Mark,

You said that "digital files are more fragile than film or prints. Corrupt a few bytes of an image file and the whole file is probably useless." Which is what led to this sub-discussion.

Media failure is something else entirely and irrelevant to this discussion. The entire point is that digital files themselves are perfectly and easily reproducible in a way that relegates the media itself to nothing more then temporary shell, akin to film holders.

You mitigate media failure by using proper backup strategy and sufficient redundancy while you prevent file corruption during transfer using CRC, checksum and other techniques.

If anything, these two actions combined (as they should be) make digital files more robust rather than more fragile compared to film or prints.

You show me a corrupted image file and I'll show you a pile of scratched, faded and otherwise physically destroyed film. Actually, I can show you these anyway, if you wish.

[Greg Miller]

Dear Greg,



Whether one considers a piece of equipment necessary or not depends on one's needs. This thread is about film photography as a business and for businesses there is nothing special about this type of storage, it is simply a typical commercial server grade disk. I've been using an earlier incarnation from HP in a redundant RAID 1 array for a long time. And yes, I've experienced disk failure, but with a hot swap fail over always waiting for the inevitable, never any data loss. Why would I willingly risk a client's -- admittedly non photographic -- data by using substandard hardware? Decent hardware is simply a cost of doing business, and as I suggested above, it is a significant cost that has to be factored in for the secure storage of digital images. And as you suggest, businesses primarily based on film will have other more pressing concerns ... dark cool dry rooms and acid free boxes. But unless they are based in Manhattan they should find that suitable storage is a little less costly than the digital equivalent. And that, in a nutshell, was all that I was trying to suggest.


Kind regards,

Richard

Are you storing your data backups on 15K SAS drives? We are not talking about primary storage here, we are talking about backups. Very few photographers need hot swaps for backup drives. Very few photographers need it for primary storage either.

Why not buy a 10K SAS drive for 1/3 less money? Or a 7200 SATA drive with a 5 year warranty for even less? You obviously felt some need for that 15K speed, which is nice for primary storage, but is overkill for backing up film scans.

Server drives are engineered to be spinning 24x7x365. That is necessary for servers providing direct access to live data by large user groups. A backup drive holding films scans by one photographer sits idle for 99+% of it's life. So a poor man's RAID (note the "inexpensive" in the acronym) of 3 separate external drives provides the redundancy to deal with single drive failures. And in my example you could double the number of drives to 6 and still only pay $0.20 per year per image.

[Mark Stahlke]

In my non-professional opinion, offering clients a choice between film and digital could give the photographer a marketing advantage. I think a commercial photography business based solely on film would be doomed to failure. A fine art (whatever that means) photography business based on film could be quite successful.

[Mark Stahlke]

There is one thing missing in the discussions about the archival nature of various media: the client. What are the client's requirements? Who is responsible for maintaining the archive?

If I was a professional photographer, I would prefer to do commercial assignments as a "work for hire" and turn over all materials to the client. The last thing I would want is a contractual obligation to maintain a film or digital archive on behalf of a client.

[Richard Mahoney]

There is one thing missing in the discussions about the archival nature of various media: the client. What are the client's requirements? Who is responsible for maintaining the archive?

If I was a professional photographer, I would prefer to do commercial assignments as a "work for hire" and turn over all materials to the client. The last thing I would want is a contractual obligation to maintain a film or digital archive on behalf of a client.

And it seems to me, Mark, that this sense of obligation or responsibility is one of the distinctions between an amateur and a professional. If one is working only to please oneself then one may feel happy to take a cavalier attitude and play fast and loose with one's data. If one has been engaged by someone else then everything changes and what may previously have been seen as acceptable risk may become totally unacceptable.

But then there are also people who just have a sense of pride in their work and who take the long view, preferring not to cut corners. The fellow who produces my drum scans is a case to point. He is not obliged to keep an archive of my scans but chooses to, it is part of the service, and consistent with his attention to quality in everything he does -- and it goes without saying that he uses a decent set of arrays. Yet it would be naive of me to think that this is inexpensive. It is just that cost of this service will be built in to the business as a whole.


Kind regards,

Richard

[mdm]

A local guy?

[Mark Stahlke]

And it seems to me, Mark, that this sense of obligation or responsibility is one of the most significant distinctions between an amateur and a professional.

Yes, indeed. That's the main reason I have no interest in turning pro. I simply don't want the responsibility. I'm afraid that would take a lot of the fun out of it.

Other people are willing to take on that responsibility and some of them make a decent living from photography. I admire them but I also realize it's not for me.

[rdenney]

If I was a professional photographer, I would prefer to do commercial assignments as a "work for hire" and turn over all materials to the client. The last thing I would want is a contractual obligation to maintain a film or digital archive on behalf of a client.

That's certainly the way the wedding biz around these parts has gone.

In terms of storage, let's think about that again. The photographer my wife and I hired for our wedding was a well-respective and highly productive high-end pro in this area. She had a room devoted to nothing but storage. And the indexing requirement, based on how she seemed to do it, wasn't insignificant. She had recently retired and was glad to be out of it because she said she spent all her time dealing with enlargements and film storage.

My NAS, on the other hand, is roughly a six-inch cube, with a wall wart power supply and a cable going to the network switch. It's big enough to store about 150,000 images from my Canon 5D, or maybe a couple of thousand high-res scans from large format. That would last an art photographer a long time, it seems to me. Might need several of them for that lady we hired.

It does not cost me much to store my film, but then I don't store it in a way that provides the level of customer service needed that kind of commercial pro. Probably the bin in which an art photographer stores his stuff isn't much bigger than my NAS. The NAS costs more than the shoe box, but I'd need it anyway and it still was not particularly expensive.

Rick "whose NAS duty cycle is a few minutes a day for the incremental backup, plus several hours each month for the full backup" Denney