In reading Lizzie's post on our Ning discussion board about whether or not to convert raw images to DMG, it brough to mind a cautionary reminder about digital that I got on Saturday night. I got all dressed up to be the good diplomatic spouse where smiled a lot and engaged in a lot of superficial chit-chat. Upon learning that I was a photographer, one gentleman who I met, a South African Banana company executive/photo enthusiast, raised some very interesting points that I hadn't considered for some time about digital. Will all of the digital images being produced right now end up in obsolete information limbo in the not-so-distant future?
He had read an article recently that raised all of the points about the quickly changing technological climate that photography is part of. I had hear all of the major arguments before and they are always a secret fear, that is: all of my digital pictures are going to be lost because the technology will be dead in the future, whereas the photographic negatives made decades ago will still be around and accessible more than likely for hundreds of years.
A while back, I went into a panic when one of my CF cards/cameras had a problem after a big shoot. I thought I had lost all of my work from the day. Certainly, this terror can (and has) strike with film. One of my most awful memories as a photographer is when I lost about 10 rolls of film from a hard day of covering floods when I was at the San Antonio Express-News. Our intern, who I never quite forgave, did not replace parts to our C-41 machines which completely ruined my negatives and threw me, my editors, and the front page editors, into a horrible panic.
I'm sure John G. Morris who with a lab assistant who famously baked most of Robert Capa's negatives from D-Day would share that sentiment. However, the big picture is a bit different with the idea that all of our work could be lost the way information from giant main frame computers from the 1960's and 1970's which used magnetic tape has been virtually evaporated. The argument goes that huge amounts of data had been stored on tape much of which physically decayed, but more than that the technology no longer exists to retrieve it. More recently there are various floppy disks, zip drives and other technology that have gone the way of the 8-track tapes.
With the scare that I've been hearing and reading about with photographers who banked and archived their work on Digital Railroad, the root fear behind it is for the most part connected to the fragility of digital photographic technology. Again, similar things can happen with digital: fires, disasters, theft or bureaucratic nightmares. Another story that I remember in Texas was the overnight folding of the now defunct Houston Post by Singleton Newspapers. Essentially, staffers came in to work one morning and were told that the newspaper, formerly one of the biggest in Texas and the U.S., had folded. They had to get everything they wanted and be out by the end of the day. Photographers freaked out and scrambled to save their work. When the New York Times bought my former newspaper, The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, about 20 years ago, the did something similar but for bizarre legal reasons that I never fully understood and destroyed all of the negatives. The DR situation reminded me of that too.
I've been shooting exclusively digital for years now and officially took the leap when I sold my film gear (save my Nikon FM2 and a few favorite lenses). It took me a while though. Photographer Maggie Steber, when she was director of photography at the Miami Herald, was fiercely cautious and skeptical of digital. She had sent me a copy of an article that I still have which pointed out the dangers of digital photography as opposed to film. In time, I had to get past it.
The fact reinforced by my time as an editor was that digital is expected and essential in the fast-moving news world. The first signs were when I shot the Superbowl in Tampa, Florida where seeing the AP photographers with their clunky backpacks which carried equipment immediately transferring the images they were shooting back to editors. I suddenly felt sorry for all of those film-digital card runners who were out of jobs. It's really part of cautionary tale about silent movies versus talkies, radio and Life magazine v. television, print newspapers v. the internet, or traditional photojournalism v. multimedia. Everything has its risks, but hopefully we're all taking the right gamble.
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