I'll stick with film, thank-you

By John Krill

January 6, 2004: I love blank-and-white photography. But that is not my primary reason for using film based cameras.

Most amateurs really don't worry about the future. They live in the present. They treat all the photographs they take the same way. They keep what is important today and throw out the rest even if those images could be important in the future. In most cases they make prints of what is important today and throw out everything else including the negatives.

That's why digital photography is so popular with amateurs. Make prints of the pictures that are important today and then delete the digital images from the computer. No concern for what may be important to them in the future.

What worries me is that professional photographers and the media companies they do work for are copying the amateurs and keeping only the images that are important to them today and deleting everything else.

Why is this? One possible reason is that digital images are very convenient until you have to store them. Moving images to long-term storage devices, such as compact disc, takes time, thought and money.

Unless you keep every image you need to decide what you are going to save, the file type you want to save it as, and the file size (how much compression you use.) With the newest digital cameras the size of an image file can be very large and saving an image file uncompressed reduces the number of images that can be saved to long-term storage and increases the time it will take to do the transfer. Even compressing image files will still leave you with large files.

You also need to consider the file type. If you save an image as a JPG file you will lose much of the color of the original image. JPG uses only 8-bits per color (red, green, blue.) The image will look good on a computer screen and lousy anywhere else.

Saving images to a CD is cost efficient but how many images can you put on a CD? A CD can store 700MBytes. Save your image as a JPG and you can get many images on a CD. A 1MByte JPG image is a large file. But save it as a TIFF file and you jump from 20MBytes to 70MBytes per image. Now how many images can you put on that CD now: 20 - 40?

Ever copy 700MBytes to a CD? Get the coffee ready. Maybe even rent a movie. It will take a while.

So using digital cameras the convenience ends with the image. Not so with film cameras.

With film based photography the convenience begins once you have processed the film. Doesn't matter if its negative or positive (color slides) once you have the film processed you have the source of your photographs and the storage medium. Just put the negatives in a draw and you're done.

The negative is my file type and my storage medium. Also digital cameras still can't come close to the resolution of just about any film that I know of. I need not worry about maxing out my hard drive and spending hours copying the images to a CD. Nothing. Sure I make a contact sheet and I have to cut and store the negatives in some kind of special envelope. How much time and money does that take?

In short I keep everything. In 50 years of picture taking I have never predicted what would be important in the future. Have you?

Now you digital types are now saying that I still need to scan the film before I can use them on a web page or make a digital print. Correct. But remember this: The next time I need to make a print from a negative I WILL have it. Will you still have that digital image?

How will we see ourselves in 50 years?

Because of the cost and time to store digital images we will have less to chose from in the future. Our visual history will have less detail. With digital photography the photographer is now an editor. He can choose what he wants his editors to see. Then the editors will reduce that list of images to what it requires. Nothing will be saved except maybe what was published.

Recently on the CBS Sunday Morning program they reported on a photographer who had worked at the White House for many years and was now retired and had published a book. There was also a show of her work at a gallery and one of the most viewed images was a contact sheet showing photos taken of Bill and Hillary Clinton. It shows the process a photographer goes through in getting that one special picture. If this had been done with a digital camera you can almost bet that only the published photo would be available. All that fine detail would be gone.

Updated January 15, 2004: The New York Times has reported that a book about the Kennedys has been created using primarily contact sheets of the orginial negatives that were destoryed on 9/11/01. The book, Remembering Jack: Intimate and Unseen Photographs of the Kennedys, is the work of Jacques Lowe.

The contact sheets were scanned with a special drum scanner and edited with Photoshop. Prints were then made from each selected contact. Most of the contacts were 2¼ by 2¼ inches and the largest prints made from these contacts was 8x10 inches.

All I could think of was this wouldn't have been possible if Mr. Lowe had used a digital camera. Not only would there have been no contact sheets but there probably wouldn't have been all the orginial images. Mr. Lowe threw away nothing.

You can read the entire article at the NY Times: Retrieving a Rare Glimpse of Those Fabled 1,000 Days.

Remember you must register before you can read articles at the Times. It's easy to do and they require little info. Be creative.

Updated February 18, 2004: To read up on Film vs Digital go to google and try the search string "stick with film" (include the quotes.) and along the way read this article on Film vs Digital.

Update March 8, 2004: Here is another more ominous example why I will stick with film. Recently two photos, one with John Kerry and another with Jane Fonda, were pasted together using a graphic editor to make the two images one. This edited, fake image was then put back on the Net (Yes the orginial images were taken from Web sites.) What disproved this phony, edited image was that the photographers of both of the original photos still had the negatives.

30 years from now when a doctored fake image is used to discredit someone will we be able to disprove that one fake digital image is really two real digital images? Then again maybe the real is the faked. How does one know the real from the doctored digital images? Read more.

Update November 9, 2004: The New York Times again. Here is an article on the problems of archiving our digitial memories. This article only reinforces my belief in film for long term archiving. For now.

-30-