on 6/27/02 10:34 AM, Walt Wayman at hiwayman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Well, duh, of course. My archives are the slides themselves. I wouldn't
> dream of "archiving" them in any digital format, TIFF or any other, each
> and every one of which sucks, when you get right down to it. I've got
> Ektachrome superslides from the late 1950s that I shot with my first "real"
> camera, a Yashica 44 twin lens reflex, and that I processed myself -- it
> was E-2 or 3 back then -- and mounted in cardboard mounts, sealed with my
> mother's iron, and they look pretty much the same today as they did then,
> because they've been properly stored. And I expect they'll last a bit
> longer because they're still properly stored.
>
> My eyes are analog, not digital, and my pictures are, too, and will stay
> that way in my archives. Digital is just a convenience, like PhotoShop,
> which, IMO, is mainly a crutch for incompetent photographers who couldn't
> get it right in the camera to begin with. :-)
>
> Fire away.
>
> Walt
Walt, you're right that the ultimate authority on the image is the film
itself, but the life of film is not infinite. While proper storage can
extend the life of film, at some age the color dyes -will- break down. A
careful digital scan, capturing as much of the data off the film as is
possible, then preserved in a recoverable format, can be a much longer-lived
archive.
Note that the digital file needs to be kept apace of technology as regards
readability (it might be hard now to recover image files kept on 8" floppys
in CPM format...) but this is not any more onerous than keeping film in a
temperature- and humidity-controlled atmosphere under hermetic seal. IF you
keep the file's readability up with technology, the data will be preserved
indefinitely without degradation. Digital is forever, if you can read it...
and if you transfer to the newer format as they are developed, the data
comes along 100%.
I think the last really archival format was glass negatives, those seem to
have held up nicely since pre-Civil War times... but I doubt anything with
color will be as long-lived.
--
Jim Brokaw
OM-1's, -2's, -4's, (no -3's yet) and no OM-oney...
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