It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of digital when it comes to photography. I embraced digital from the start, and spend a huge amount of my time working with digital tools and helping many photographers learn to do the same. But there is a darker side to digital. I think it is stealing memories…
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. My mom has been gradually working on cleaning out boxes of memories, distributing them to me and my three sisters so we can enjoy them. And of course when family members and friends go to visit the big photographer in the sky, there are many photographs and mementos left behind. That’s happened far too many times recently, but it has stirred up many great memories, mostly thanks to old photographs.In the world of digital photography, I’m afraid this ability to revisit memories might be getting lost more often than it should be. Don’t get me wrong, I fully realize people are taking far more pictures than ever before, so you could argue even more memories are being preserved.But my concern isn’t about the rate of capture, but rather about the ones that got away. So often I witness people deleting digital photos either on the camera or on the computer because the picture didn’t turn out very well. I completely understand this perspective, but it does cause me some concern at least when it comes to my own memories. And this doesn’t even contemplate the images that are lost because of media failure, discarding a computer that was thought not to contain any important data, or other causes of lost digital images.Back in the days of film photography, when you got your film developed you generally ended up with a paper envelope filled with 4×6 prints and a set of negatives. You’d go through them all, perhaps put the favorites in a photo album or frame, and the rest would go in a shoe box in the closet.Many years later, someone would take down that shoe box, dust it off, and explore. Let’s not kid ourselves. There would be a lot of very bad photos in that box. But sometimes those are my favorites. Photos that in the digital world might have been deleted because they were out of focus or the person was making a funny face or whatever often represent the only photo of a particular (and important) memory.So, as much as I might worry about my hard drives filling up, I’m more worried about losing photographs that represent important memories, so I tend not to delete very many photographs. Perhaps as my library of images grows I’ll start to re-think this decision, but for now I’ve decided that the memories are more important than hard drive space or a bit of an organizational dilemma.I’d be curious to hear your thoughts, and what you do to help ensure photographs of important memories are never lost.
Losing Memories to Digital
I just had a similar conversation with friends last week. I decided for my photos that have nothing to do with family that I should make one hard drive that contained all my favorites. I mark it “Best of Betty”. There is no way my kids will ever look through everything I have saved. For the family photos, I usually make a cd for each kid after each event so they have them forever.
I delete almost nothing – except for the totally useless, like pics of the grass taken by mistake. I upload the more memorable pics to both Smugmug and Flickr. In addition, I upload old family pics that I have scanned to both Geni and Facebook. I print the best (i.e. the ones I really care about) on paper.
I hope my family will take over my hard drives (master + backup) when I croak, and maintain the payments on my online services.
I have an online backup at Mozy (last year or so, going back slowly) just in case.
With all of these precautions, something may survive.
I purchased a epson perfection v700 and have bee for the past two years slowly, slowly, digitizing my slides and photos that go back to my first 35mm camera, a minolta 101 that I purchased in the px in Viet Nam in 1968. It will take me probably several more years to complete but It is being worth it. Adobe photoshop cs4 has also helped.
The problem with digital is that there is no shoebox.
I’m a computer security professional by day. One of our neighbors lost an adult child to an auto accident. The neighbor brought me his laptop and asked if I could get past the password and send a note to all of his contacts with the bad news.
I did that, and also saw a photos folder. After getting permission, and checking for images that were not-parent-appropriate I made up a slide show for them (and saved it as a PDF). Some brought forth memories of things like holiday-family parties and some were just vacation photos of him and his friends that they enjoyed seeing. That became their shoebox.
Maybe we should all print more…
Steve
PS for the privacy aware folks… We live in a small town, with neighbor to neighbor sensibilities. We here consider the images on that computer to be no more or less private than the same images in the shoebox would have been. I thought about hacking laws and came to two conclusions. One, no one would complain. Two, the laptop was inherited by his parents, thus they had the legal right to authorize a search. Let’s not go off on a tangent.
In general, digital is no different than film…the only images that will survive our death are the ones we print.
Winston Mitchell
Boise, Idaho
This was such a valuable entry in your blog, I am sure it made many people head to their printers to save those wonderful memories. Yours were certainly worth saving.
Shirley Dean
+1 on printing. It’s not going to be very exciting to open that old, dusty shoebox only to find…a portable hard drive. I use 17×25 sheets (satin 2.0 from Red River Paper) in my Epson 3800 in a Lightroom template that prints 36 wallet-plus size photos. I replace the photos quite often as new ones come in. They fit in a pocket in my bag and when people see them, the reaction is usually “wow you have real photos!” Guess where the old ones go? In a dusty old shoebox!
i spend a lot of time thinking about this, too, tim. i keep telling myself i’m going to make a small print of everything and just throw it in a shoebox somewhere, but then. . . i don’t. it’s just one of those things that has stopped being automatic. the photograph used to be “done” when you made a print. now it’s done when you process the TIFF and deliver it to the client, or email a JPEG to your buddies.
you’re right, the very significant downside to this change in process is not something any of us will immediately recognize. we’ll just notice, thirty years from now, that we won’t have anything to casually leaf through and remember the important bits.
i wrote about this a while ago as well, after stumbling across some pictures of my mother from before i was born.
http://www.msgphoto.com/latestshot/2009/07/19/my-mother-before-me/
For those who have accumulated thousands of slides (& color negs) I recommend (after pruning those of little or no interest to family) to take advantage of one of the commercial film scanning services to save the images on DVD (or an external hard drive). Although I have a decent film scanner I didn’t want to spend time scanning them all. The quality and service I got from ScanCafe.com was well worth the investment, not to mention freeing up closet space filled w/ old Carousels and slide boxes.
I second Winston Mitchel “the only images that survive our death are the ones we print” adding “and / or publish”
Personally I have a memory of memories in a shoebox: When my grandpa passed away 23 years ago I flipped through a shoebox of archived 6×9 negs and my parents decided to discard them.
IDK. – I fear they won’t have the energy to go through my slides or the files full of homeprocessed BW negs… – They discarded their old slides themselves.
I think Picasa or Lightroom for the better equipped make things way more convenient for heirs and such. Here I am typing on a bedside PC. I haven’t deleted much / many files. – Sure the family knickknack my ex sold on ebay never reached my own HDDs. (I didn’t have an USB port of my own back when I shot it for her and memory cards were pricy and rapidly filled with those RAW files) But later when a friend borrowed my camera I made it a habit to save the pictures on the cards before formating these and yes even those captures are still showing up in my Picasa, together with stuff I shot at work and everything. – So I think whoever will get my hardware will have the pictures too + peace to look at them.
That aside: I am missing the feeling of looking at a drying roll of MF negs: the excitement, the curiosity how they ‘ll turn out in an attempt to print them, the confidence some of them radiated…
I think I should scan what I have but I am so lazy : (
I had my son e-mail, whenever possible, pics from him and his buddies when he served in the gulf.
I put them on my website for the familiesand friends, but then printed 486 pictures when he returned home.
Along with that pile was archival photo pages.
His tangible print photo album is a treasured keepsake and will become more so as years go by.
Since then I have been printing selections of my own photos simply cause this far into the digital age nothing beats a decent album scrapbook or shoebox of prints…
wjd – convert from days of film n prints, not to mention manual everything!
USB Drive: 10 years
Hard Drive: 10 years
CD-ROM: 5-25 years
DVD: up to 100 years
Keep in mind that DVD’s may be worthless not too far into the future. How many people still own Record Players? ZIP drives?
My bigger fear is that we will simply be taking too many photos. With film, every exposure counted, and every copy cost something. There were simply less photos, which makes each one more valuable.
I could pass down a hard drive with 10,000 images, but each individual image would be generally worthless, I think. (Also, there is a lack of documentation, unlike on the back of printed photographs, written by hand).
Think about trading cards, for example. If they were digital, would they have any value whatsoever?
For archival purposes, keeping all digital photos is important. I once considered starting some sort of “archival” tradition where each generation would re-copy the previous generation’s photos on newer media, and add their own.
As an aside, for shits and giggles, I think it would be awesome to write letters to my future grand-grand-children asking about what the future is like and what life in the 2000 is like (I am 20 by the way so not quite there yet). Oh, and maybe several versions for them to read at specific ages (13, 16, 18, 21, 25, etc). I know I would definitely look forward to receiving those letters from past family members.
My father recently digitized some slides from when he lived in Somalia as a child. Simply amazing. A lot weren’t high quality. Hell, some were just plain blurry. There were maybe 20 pictures. But they are still the best family photos I have ever seen.
For archival purposes, preserving digital is important.
For sentimental purposes, digital is nearly worthless.
Print your pictures. Give them life as a physical object. Give them character by hand-writing the occasion and people involved. Do not strip them of their value by printing 5 of each photo.
Digitizing things really does take the soul out of things. That’s why I’ve really been enjoying vinyl after growing up with MP3s. You learn to take care of these analog treasures, cherish them.
Records are alive: they require proper care, they age, and how they sound reveals their history and their environment. You can tell if the previous owners stored them properly by the amount of warping. You can tell which of its tracks have been listened to the most, the irony of which is that the best tracks sound the worst.
But this is a beautiful feature, I think. It’s like a built-in defense against indulgence (thanks MTV culture). “If you listed to me too much I will self-destruct.”
I must say at this point I have little confidence in the permanence of any digital image that is not printed. The hard copy, despite the chances of physical destruction, is the format proven to survive no matter the medium or storage method that will come next. In my family shoebox of photos is a metal plate( a daugerreotype maybe?) with an image of my great grandfather on it and the only picture we have of him. As long as someone has eyes they can view it.