On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 11:06 PM, Rick Womer <rwomer1...@yahoo.com> wrote: > My mother is having an (ahem) advanced birthday next week, and I went digging > around for some old photos. > > Well, there are thousands and thousands of photos in this house, prints here, > slides there, the negatives someplace else. Slides from about 1992 onwards > are fairly systematically filed in slide pages in loose leaf notebooks, but > there are still scads of prints and negs, because sometimes (for some reason) > I shot print film. > > This reminded me that a key advantage of digital is that it is tidy. Instead > of shoeboxes and closets and drawers full of photos, things are neatly stored > on hard drives, catalogued by date in Lightroom. > > It also reminded me of a key disadvantage of digital. I pulled out slides > and negs I shot in 1965, and they're a bit dusty and faded, but viewable with > a light box and loupe, and printable. Will anybody be able to view my DNGs > in 2051? > > Then there was the weird time travel of old family photos, and shots from old > family vacations and holidays and homes. > > Makes me feel old. I think I'll go to bed. >
Yes. Your hard drive pooches and you never backed up and yes, you can recover the data but it will be time consuming, and if you didn't have friends in the world of computers it would be expensive and so on and so on and so on. Not that negs and prints can't be damaged in basement floods, fires, ripped, scratched, etc. Still, I find it comforting to hold the actual image in my hands (even in negative form) and look at it - without any conversion device required. I like that about film. cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
