BBestone Posted February 14, 2015 Share #1 Posted February 14, 2015 Advertisement (gone after registration) I've been wondering.....with today's technology being so transient and evolving so fast, I, myself would like to have an 'original' of my photos....like a negative. With the " cloud' being vaporous, cd's can scratch, backup external drives can stop working, along with thumb drives, and computers can crash--it has me worried. I am concerned about preserving the photographs besides printing those 'keepers' out. Does anyone have any input with putting digital photographs to negatives? I found this one site and was curious.......https://www.gammatech.com/html/recording35neg.shtml?gclid=CMXtweye4sMCFUnl7AodkzgALA. One thing film photography has is a permanent--in your hands--record! Any ideas? ( and no, I'm not ready to go to film just yet! Someday, maybe-g-) Thanx.... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advertisement Posted February 14, 2015 Posted February 14, 2015 Hi BBestone, Take a look here Digital images into negatives?. I'm sure you'll find what you were looking for!
dpitt Posted February 14, 2015 Share #2 Posted February 14, 2015 In a way you are right to be concerned. I am using 'personal' computers (Commodore 64) since 1982 or so, have been in software development since 1987. Most people are only using digital camera's since 2000, so when I compare the preservation of my program content to the future of my digital photo archive it should allow me to look ahead for some 20 years or so. Conclusions for software/DB are: 1. Anything on tape from the Commodore 64 (primitive spreadsheets, games, programs) is lost and unreadble since the early 90's 2. Any floppy started to be unreadable around 5-10 years after they were created 3. Data on hard drives has been conserved much longer with 10+ years of reliability. (CD rom disks failed more than drives) 4. The programs that were able to read the date are sometimes not available anymore and/or incompatible with current systems. 10- 15 years of life-expectancy max. e.g. it may be hard to open up some old DB format that ran under DOS 4.0 now, or something the ran only under Mac OS 7 5. Drives from older systems get harder to read as technology advances. SCSI and IDE drives are obsolete now, Firewire is gone... 6. I have been copying backups of my data over and over again to my newer systems since about 1990. Nothing was lost or deleted since then. So it is still around, just hard to read. e.g. I was able to find some customer address that was stored around '93 for the first time by simply scanning the raw data of an old Filemaker Pro file. Keeping copies is easy and cheap, storage gets cheaper/faster with each generation. In 1988 I had an AT with 30 MB hard drive, now its a network with Mac Pro and several laptops totalling over 10 TB of drive space. Copying over all data from 1990 to 2005 is peanuts now, and takes not even a minute. Conclusion applied to photo domain: - Do not worry to much about JPEG format. It will be readable in the far future. Worry more about RAW files for specific camera's. They will get harder to read even if you have the file because the converters will get lost. - Any hardware will become unreadable pretty fast (10 years), so it is important to keep multiple copies, and copy them over to newer technology when you get that. Do not put your eggs in one basket! Keep multiple copy and do not keep them one one site. My mother gets a disk with full copy of my archive every year, so that it will survive even fire at my home. Using cloud storage is also fine for this purpose. - IMO Negative scanners will become rare in a few years and certainly in 50 years. AFAIK, no new models of decent scanners were built in the last 10 years. If you keep copying over your data to newer hardware, it should be safe for your own lifetime. What happens after you are dead is responsability of the next generation. They should keep copying the archives also. This also applies to negatives. No use in you storing lots of negatives if the next generation will neglect/maltreat them or will not have a scanner to read them. Chances that they will be able to open a JPEG file in 50 years are much higher than that they will have a decent negative scanner. So IMO buying cloud storage and a few external disk drives are a better and cheaper solution to your problem, provided you keep copying them to newer hardware every 5 years or so. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
peterbengtson Posted February 15, 2015 Share #3 Posted February 15, 2015 There is no need to make a negative, make a good archival print or prints and store them properly. You can also have one of several companies make silver based archival prints from you digital files if you feel silver based technology will last longer. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Broadside Posted February 15, 2015 Share #4 Posted February 15, 2015 Google's Vint Cerf warns of 'digital Dark Age' Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
spydrxx Posted February 15, 2015 Share #5 Posted February 15, 2015 Slightly different approach. A couple of years ago I gave a lecture in a remote community which I discovered a couple of days in advance didn't have digital projection capabilities. Since I didn't have a digital projector either and they didn't know where to rent one, I decided to have my digital lecture photos made into slides, as they did have a slide projector. I didn't have a lot of confidence in the output, but beggers can't be choosers. The final cost was about $1.50/slide. Results were delivered to the site, as time was short. WOW...I was really blown away...color was spot on, and seeing those shots projected on a big screen was fantastic. It doesn't solve your issue, but, for special occasions, it can work really well. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
250swb Posted February 15, 2015 Share #6 Posted February 15, 2015 If you want an actual negative from a digital file, as in something you can hold, you can buy an inkjet transparency paper specifically for this. It works best in larger formats, but no reason it shouldn't be useful for 35mm. It allows digital files to be printed in the darkroom on silver based paper as has been demonstrated by Sebastiao Salgado in his book and exhibition 'Genesis' in which the vast project needed to be 'merged' between his use of film and digital. Steve Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
wattsy Posted February 15, 2015 Share #7 Posted February 15, 2015 Advertisement (gone after registration) Film recorders have been around for donkey's years and are the obvious way of transferring digital files to film as a negative or positive. Like any copying or conversion process, there is inevitably a generation loss involved but the quality can be very good and resolution at least will compare well with, for example, a 35mm Tri-X negative. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
zeitz Posted February 15, 2015 Share #8 Posted February 15, 2015 I agree with most of Dirk's sound advice. I do have a few comments. - No storage technology suddenly disappears overnight. When new storage technology comes out, update quickly. - Clouds are reliable only if it is a private Cloud that you own. Public Clouds do not use policies that are in your interest. Hard drives are so cheap that you can have multiple backups stored with every close relative. Additionally, if you have lots of files, you use a lot of bandwidth moving the files to the Cloud. - .dng will be around a long time. Use the free Adobe software to convert all proprietary raw files to .dng. - The problem with .jpg is that it is only 8 bit. 16 bit TIFF will also be around a long time. But in the end, you should have .dng raw files converted from proprietary formats. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
fore Posted February 16, 2015 Share #9 Posted February 16, 2015 I agree with most of Dirk's sound advice. I do have a few comments.- No storage technology suddenly disappears overnight. When new storage technology comes out, update quickly. - Clouds are reliable only if it is a private Cloud that you own. Public Clouds do not use policies that are in your interest. Hard drives are so cheap that you can have multiple backups stored with every close relative. Additionally, if you have lots of files, you use a lot of bandwidth moving the files to the Cloud. - .dng will be around a long time. Use the free Adobe software to convert all proprietary raw files to .dng. - The problem with .jpg is that it is only 8 bit. 16 bit TIFF will also be around a long time. But in the end, you should have .dng raw files converted from proprietary formats. I somewhat agree, but then again, working .dng and metadata changes is a pain. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
dpitt Posted February 16, 2015 Share #10 Posted February 16, 2015 I somewhat agree, but then again, working .dng and metadata changes is a pain. Indeed, for long term archiving TIFF and JPEG make more sense. Both will be around for very long, I think. JPEG has best chances of all current picture formats to survive because it is so common. Also digital storage stays the same quality over the years. Prints and negatives will eventually degrade, so even if their quality is better than JPEG initially, they will not be after 100 years of storage. It is hard to predict the future for 100 years in a digital world where even 10 years prediction is hard (who predicted the smartphone revolution 10 years ago?). But I am confident that digital technology will survive, unless there will be a total collapse of technology, and anything high tech we have now will look primitive for computers of the future. As long as the file format contains all info to show the image, they will figure it out. It becomes harder if you need to find a raw converter for a long obsolete camera. Or if you need to read a propriatary format for adjustments first like with Aperture or Lightroom files... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
zeitz Posted February 16, 2015 Share #11 Posted February 16, 2015 I don't quite know what you mean "working .dng and metadata changes is a pain." Do you mean working with raw files and metadata image adjustment is a pain? I don't see the difference of working proprietary file raw or .dng raw. Proprietary raw in Photoshop creates a .xmp sidecar; .dng can have the data that would be in the sidecar stored in the .dng file. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
dpitt Posted February 18, 2015 Share #12 Posted February 18, 2015 It is hard to predict which formats will survive over the period useful for this thread. More complicated formats with sidekicks and metadata are more likely to be hard once the propriatary editors are gone. Digital photo formats are not around long enough to really predict. In word processing formats we already have examples of once dominant formats that are very hard to open correctly now. e.g. Word Perfect files for DOS RagTime files for Mac Classic OS ClarisWorks files for Mac Classic Best chances to open these would be to find an ancient hardware (or emulator). Then find a compatible release of the software or contemporary conversion software. Then convert to a more modern format. Even going back 10-20 years this way is hard, so I can imagine my grand children sttuggling to open my files 50 years from now. It is hard enough for them to have to copy the files over to a different hardware carrier every 10 years. So I want to make it as simple for them as possible to open the files. They will not mind a bit of quality loss from JPEG files, I suppose. I do not have similar examples for image files, but there sure will be in 10-20 years IMO Of course archiving for your own use is different. There you want to use a lossless format. I just backup my Aperture catalogs. They include RAW and JPEG files for every picture in a folder structure. So full quality is there and full convenience to open them as long as I have Aperture software running. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaapv Posted February 18, 2015 Share #13 Posted February 18, 2015 But formats like BMP and TIFF have been around for decades and are not showing any signs of obsolescence. Proprietary formats will disappear, universal ones are reasonably safe, I think. JPG will be safe too, as there are so many millions Terabytes of historically important files that there will always be an interest to produce conversion programs etc. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
zeitz Posted February 19, 2015 Share #14 Posted February 19, 2015 Dirk, Aperture is now an obsolete orphan. It is already the time to convert the Aperture files to Adobe. I understand Lightroom now has an Aperture converter. We don't know yet what the new MacIntosh Photo app will do. Some of the programs mentioned (such as Word Perfect) and others (such as Lotus 1 2 3) were put out of business by the more dominant player, in this case Microsoft. Aperture was also killed off by the more dominant player, Adobe. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
dpitt Posted February 20, 2015 Share #15 Posted February 20, 2015 Dirk, Aperture is now an obsolete orphan. It is already the time to convert the Aperture files to Adobe. I understand Lightroom now has an Aperture converter. We don't know yet what the new MacIntosh Photo app will do. Yes indeed. Aperture is becoming a good example of what I wanted to illustrate Fortunately as long as I have older hardware and software at hand this is not an issue. Thanks for mentioning the converter from Adobe. Will have a look at that and yes when I upgrade to newer hardware, I will probably convert. I have been a die hard Apple fan for 25 years now, but I must admit they do not have a great record on backwards compatibility and continuity Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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