There are many reasons why I prefer film photography. This is just one of them.
I see two certainties involved with computing:
- Hardware failure and data loss with happen at regular intervals.
- I will always hate having to back up files. Thinking about backing up those backups as the backup media gets outdated makes me grimace.
I’m not being technophobic. I just prefer when things are simple. A future where the longevity of photographic archive requires me to keep up with the rapid turnover rate of computer hardware and software is not one I want.
I recall an experience where I heard a digital photographer talking about cutting edge, two thousand dollar RAID system he just put in place to keep his many thousands of digital photography files safe. My first thought was that the technology would be laughable in terms of storage capacity in five years time. We’ll have a newer faster hard drive interface, and the discs will be able to spin at 200,000 more RPM. I image that he will be doing whole thing over again to keep up with the technology.
Meanwhile, here is all the backing up I’ve had to do over the past ten years.
With film, I can just file and forget. Each binder and a pack of one-hundred negative sleeves runs about $30 and will never be outdated technology. No software drivers are ever going to be unavailable which will leave them unreadable. In ten more years, I imagine that the only thing that will really change is how tall the stack of binders is. So simple it hurts.
You just wait till your house burns down!
While film storage is incredibly durable, I understand that it isn’t indestructible. My grandfather’s slides from the 1950s were not stored with much care, and as a result they’ve all been destroyed by fungus.
The other great threat towards my file and forget method of film archiving is of course a house fire. Luckily for us though, house fires aren’t that common. I can’t say that I even know a single person who has lost all of their possessions to a house fire. Yet, I’ve experienced hard drive failure many times in my life. The worst of which was a power surge back in 2001 which caused some of the internals on my motherboard and hard drive to explode. Literally.
Just as most oil painters wouldn’t switch to a Wacam tablet and Photoshop to keep their work more immune to a fire, I’m not going to use it as a fear point for switching. Any digital photographer who isn’t making off site backups is sitting in the same boat as use film photographers anyways.
Contingency Plan
I think I might add a small layer of fire protection though. I think a reasonable contingency plan would be to get a program such as SyncBackPro* and have it monitor the folders that my scanned files get saved to. As I scan my negatives, the files would automatically be uploaded to my web server for backup. Then in the event of total negative loss due to a natural disaster, at least part of my archive will be retrievable as a second generation copy.
*It is now 2016 and I backup all my scans using Amazon Drive
10 Archived Comments
You’ve never mention dye fade on color negs and slides. as well as vinegar syndrome. The only way to prevent these problems is by freezing the developed film.
Kim –
Great point: “Just as most oil painters wouldn’t switch to a Wacam tablet and Photoshop to keep their work more immune to a fire”..
Agreed, this is one of the most important advantadges (IMO).
I have many of my dad’s slides & negs from the 70s and 80s. It’s kept in an old house and the thing is a freezer in winter. He grew up there but curently it’s just a holiday house for us. In the same room, there is a lot of vinyl as well.
I have photos from 2004 till now kept in my 2 PCs, I wanna buy an HDD but I’m too lazy to classify and backup. C’mon, it’s boring! Much nicer to classify film, seeing the negs/slides.
One advantadge of digital is multiple copies without loss. But… no physical copy still, and a PITA to mantain. Well, scans.
Just this morning I removed my black Nikon FM2 from storage. As a professional photographer and early convert to digital, I have not taken a picture on film since about 2005. And I miss it. I am so sick of technology moving faster than quality, and the expense of constantly keeping up. Here’s to a simpler time. Time to buy some film and leave the Canon 1Ds Mark II at home for a while!
Here here
hehe, well said.
Try not to put romantic candles next to your stack and…quit smoking if youre a smoker 😛
I did a quick look at fire proof safes. Fire Proof didn’t necessarily mean Heat Proof. I’d still be worried that they would get hot enough that I’d worry about melting.
There also were some media safes that offered higher temperature protection. But damn, even the small storage area ones seemed very expensive.
This is great… very apt points here.. i completely agree.
I am doing just the same as you.
However i think maybe a fire-safe might be a good purchase at least if the house burns down you can dig out the safe and retrieve all the filmy goodness.
Must look into that
Every time I see posts like this and this, I feel comfortable knowing I haven’t converted.
Ditto on all of the above.
But I can add more reasons to prefer film.
– It looks better.
– Tonal Range (Real HDR)
– It looks better.
That is my unassailably objective, scientific determination.