Digital photography is fantastic! No film or development costs, no waiting, take all the pictures you want. Instant results. When we bought our first camera, a Sony DSC–F505V Cybershot, it would not be uncommon to shoot 200 pictures in a week-end.
I’m one of those weird people that actually saves & files my negatives. (Yes, I know you all do the same, but it’s not the norm). From the 30–year period from 1970 to 1999, I have about 3,600 colour and black & white negatives (I used to do my own developing & printing). That’s 120 pictures a year. After three years of digital photography, we just rolled over the counter from 9999 to 0000. That’s three times the photos in one-tenth the time interval, or a 30–to–1 increase.
So Kodak is losing massive revenue, and laying off a large part of its workforce. Polaroid is a nostalgic memory. Everybody has clued in to this new technology, and are saying good-bye forever to film.
There’s just one little problem. What do you do with all these digital photos?
Sure, store them on your computer. What happens when (not if) your hard drive crashes? Is wiped by a virus?
Have you backed them up? A good digital photo, suitable for 3 × 5 printing, is about 1280 X 960 pixels, or about a 500KB (500,000 bytes) file. Most people won’t splurge $800 on a backup tape drive, so the only alternative is CD-R. You do realize they’re only good for a few years, right?
A CD-R is a plastic disc coated with a thin layer of photo-sensitive dye. Think about it: if all it takes is a milliwatt laser to burn an image, how will the dye hold up to decades of temperature and humidity stress? Don’t expect to view Junior’s baby pictures from a CD thirty years from now. And that doesn’t take into account changes in computer technology. (Know where I can convert my 5Ľ” floppies?).
I’m paranoid, so after my wife has copied the weekly batch of photos to the kitchen computer’s hard drive, I take the camera to my office and copy them to my work computer before erasing the camera’s memory card. Plus, I back up the photos to 4mm DDS computer tape.
This is one of the reasons I love my digital movie camera (a Sony DCR–TRV17): I never have to go near a computer. The movies are stored on MiniDV digital tapes.
I put forth the suggestion that the most urgent task ahead of us, if we are not to lose our precious family photos, is to immediately have them printed on genuine, authentic photographic paper. You can have them done at Wal-Mart for about 33˘ a print. Just burn the photos to a CD–R, and have them printed on paper that will last decades. Cruising the Internet, I’ve seen some places quoting 12˘–17˘ (US) per print. The beauty is that you don’t have to worry about losing the CD, it’s just a copy!
The paradox is that it is the very abundance of digital photos that are causing a problem. You don’t really want to print every single photo you shot. After all, we take many pictures just so we can select the best one. They don’t cost anything, so there is no reason not to shoot a dozen just in case. However, who has the time to sit through thousands of pictures, mulling over each one, just so you can select the ones you want to print? Faced with such a herculean task, we just put it off until it becomes insurmountable.
Forget about printing more than the occasional photo on your inkjet printer. I calculated that between the glossy paper and the cartridge, it costs me 50˘ per 3 × 5 photo to print at home. Plus, the ink will quickly fade, and is nowhere near in the same league as photographic paper for permanence.
Here are a few practical tips from my own experience.
Most of the photo software that comes with cameras or printers is worthless. Get yourself a super editing tool like ThumbsPlus from Cerious Solutions (www.cerious.com). You can print great contact sheets, economically displaying fifteen or more photos per page. The contact sheets allow you to review at a glance, compare and select the best photos to print.
While reviewing your photos, you can change the file names to something more meaningful, like “0173 Granny Bertha & baby Mary at the cottage.JPG”, instead the “DSC0173.JPG” assigned by the camera software. (Warning! always preserve the original number).
This is an important point. I work in the field of genealogy and family history. It is tragic how often the memories of people’s lives are lost because no one saw fit to write their names under their photos. Your family’s identities may be so obvious as to make captions redundant today. A couple of generations from now, they will be but anonymous old fogies. Label the photos now! Today! This will also give you a convenient way of searching for all photos with the word “Granny” (Find all files named “*granny*.JPG”). There’s nothing wrong with using the same caption for a series of photos involving the same people; the photo number will differentiate.
The latest version of ThumbsPlus has a nice feature to help you with this. ThumbsPlus has a ‘batch processing’ operation, whereby a series of transformations can be applied to all the photos in a folder. ‘Stamping’ a photo is the process of blending text into the image. Assuming you have assigned meaningful names to your photo files, you can easily stamp each file name & date into the corner of a set of selected photos. When the photos are printed, they will include the description and the date. Voilŕ! No more anonymous ancestors. (Note: I have successfully stamped photos with my version 4 of ThumbsPlus; batch stamping is available in ver. 6).
You can back up your photos by FTP to remote Web sites, but there’s no guarantee they will always be in business. Ironically, your best backup could be… 35mm film. Another alternative is cheap, removable hard drives. I google 40GB (80,000 photos, or 24 years) for U$124, that’s pretty amazing.
I’m not happy with Sony: their batteries and proprietary memory sticks are outrageously priced. The batteries fail prematurely. Sony doesn’t answer its tech support email.
Have fun, and remember, for your progeny’s sake, please label those photos!