This year I'm shooting 50/50 film and digital.
I recently did a powerpoint presentation for my dad's 75th birthday. I scanned hundreds of old photographs. I was able to do quick fixes to restore color. As I did so I got to thinking "what will most people using digital cameras have in 50 years?" Will they have any of the photos they took this year in a print or computer file format that is readable?
Most people do not know to backup their files until it is too late. Hard drive crashes, they throw out their old computer and forget to copy files, and the more likely even though they burned their digital pictures to a CD that CD is now unreadable because they didn't make a copy of it every few years. When burnable CDs came out the estimate was a 75 year life. Now that estimate is more like 5 years. People will have to continually backup digital pictures on discs, convert file formats to current ones, etc.
And the film user? All they have to do is keep their prints, and negatives if they want. They don't have to complain about "why are my pictures blue? why are my pictures so dark?" If they shot film and took it to a good photo lab (not walmart or a drug store) they would get great looking prints because the film would be corrected for exposure during developing, film that has more dynamic range than today's P&S cameras.
How much hassle will your digital pictures be over the next 50 years vs. film prints and negatives?
It seems there's always a company putting out a better way to fix up digital pictures. Whether it's at a print kiosk or in-camera, it's painfully obvious that P&S cameras do not take great looking pictures without something being done to them to print well. This is because the photo lab has been taken out of the loop.
Many people also think "why would I want to print my digital pictures?" I thought that way at first, then I learned better. Photography is about prints, not LCD screens. People spend $300 on a camera so that they DON'T have to make any prints - which is just wrong.
The build quality and lens quality of P&S cameras has really come down in the past couple of years as it gets more competitive. Now most lenses have a maximum appeture when at full zoom averaging 5.5 when just a couple of years ago they rarely hit 5.0. Quality rarely goes up when competition increases and prices come down.
The great thing about film is - you drop it off at your photo lab, and you pick up great looking prints and you don't have to labor over RAW files, monitor calibration, printing profiles! And for a low price you can get your film scanned at a high dpi too. For a far cheaper price than you scanning all 24 negatives and tweaking the colors and exposure to look good on your screen. Your photo lab has all their settings down.
I recently did a powerpoint presentation for my dad's 75th birthday. I scanned hundreds of old photographs. I was able to do quick fixes to restore color. As I did so I got to thinking "what will most people using digital cameras have in 50 years?" Will they have any of the photos they took this year in a print or computer file format that is readable?
Most people do not know to backup their files until it is too late. Hard drive crashes, they throw out their old computer and forget to copy files, and the more likely even though they burned their digital pictures to a CD that CD is now unreadable because they didn't make a copy of it every few years. When burnable CDs came out the estimate was a 75 year life. Now that estimate is more like 5 years. People will have to continually backup digital pictures on discs, convert file formats to current ones, etc.
And the film user? All they have to do is keep their prints, and negatives if they want. They don't have to complain about "why are my pictures blue? why are my pictures so dark?" If they shot film and took it to a good photo lab (not walmart or a drug store) they would get great looking prints because the film would be corrected for exposure during developing, film that has more dynamic range than today's P&S cameras.
How much hassle will your digital pictures be over the next 50 years vs. film prints and negatives?
It seems there's always a company putting out a better way to fix up digital pictures. Whether it's at a print kiosk or in-camera, it's painfully obvious that P&S cameras do not take great looking pictures without something being done to them to print well. This is because the photo lab has been taken out of the loop.
Many people also think "why would I want to print my digital pictures?" I thought that way at first, then I learned better. Photography is about prints, not LCD screens. People spend $300 on a camera so that they DON'T have to make any prints - which is just wrong.
The build quality and lens quality of P&S cameras has really come down in the past couple of years as it gets more competitive. Now most lenses have a maximum appeture when at full zoom averaging 5.5 when just a couple of years ago they rarely hit 5.0. Quality rarely goes up when competition increases and prices come down.
The great thing about film is - you drop it off at your photo lab, and you pick up great looking prints and you don't have to labor over RAW files, monitor calibration, printing profiles! And for a low price you can get your film scanned at a high dpi too. For a far cheaper price than you scanning all 24 negatives and tweaking the colors and exposure to look good on your screen. Your photo lab has all their settings down.
