As a hobbyist photographer whose original best friends in the field were Kodak Tri-X Pan black-and-white film (for high school, college, newspaper and army journalism assignments), Kodacolor and Kodachrome for more personal projects, but who went digital seven years ago and hasn’t looked back, I can see both sides. Sometimes I miss Kodachrome, especially (and still love Paul Simon’s “Don’t Take My Kodachrome Away.” Best opening line EVER: “When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school/It’s a wonder I can think at all”). Of the thousands of photos I’ve taken over the past 30-something years, some of my favorites still are prints made from Kodachrome slides.
But I became a better photographer (maybe not good yet, but working on it) with digital simply because it allowed me the luxury of endless repetition: Once you buy the camera and the computer, you’re done spending (unless you get prints made, which I’ve been known to do). I pressed the shutter button on my first digital camera, a Lumix FZ20, almost 90,000 times, pointed the camera and focused on a subject probably 300,000 times, before I retired it. Practice has not made me perfect yet, but still the practice has been invaluable. If nothing else, I’ve learned to see light itself in a whole new (to me) way.
And the digital format allows me to “share” photographs through on-line media like Flickr, which in turn has given me the opportunity to meet other hobbyists (and pros) from all over the world. Compared to showing photo albums or slide shows to whomever you can lure into your physical presence, this alone is amazing. One of the fringe benefits of that aspect is that, with your pictures on line, you don’t even have to be there to show them to other people--they can happen onto your photo stream, wander around, look at a few, enjoy them (you hope); then, later, you see what they’ve looked at and are able to revisit images you might have forgotten (like the one I’m going to attach to this post, if I remember).
In the article I read this evening about Kodak’s bankruptcy, the writer quoted a “commenter” on an “Atlantic Monthly” story about same. The commenter wondered if, in 100 years, any of today’s digital images would still be accessible. He had prints from 19th century photos, he said; would any digital images survive? Good question. I’ve asked myself the same thing.
Technology changes so rapidly, will files we’ve backed up on external hard drives, etc., even be able to be read by computers of 10 years from now, or 20? Or two?
The hope, I suppose, is that Flickr and Photobucket and whatever other on-line photo storage companies are out there truly mean it, and, more importantly, believe it, when they tell us that what we store with them is “forever,” that the 37,000 pictures I’ve got on Flickr so far somehow will be available to me when I’m in my dotage (not that far down the road) and to anybody else who cares to look at them, long into the distant future.
My best guess, of course, is that none of it is “permanent,” that Flickr, et al, ultimately will die or fade away or otherwise disappear, and along with them the millions or maybe billions of images from all over our world, the daily photographic record of millions, maybe billions of people.
And that is probably as it is supposed to be.
Across the road from me is a very small, old cemetery. Nobody around here now knows anything at all about the people buried there, who died between 1870 and 1901, really not that long ago.
In the long run I suppose it doesn’t matter. Life goes on, the world goes on, one way or another.
But . . . Wouldn’t it be SOOOO very cool for, say, whoever lives in this house or on this property 300 years from now to be able to pull up my 21st-century photo stream and see real life fin this particular spot rom that long ago? Wouldn’t it be SOOOO very cool to be able to “see” history, to see the world, as it unfolds or grows on a day-to-day basis?
