You are right, it would be difficult to have them digitally accessible through the ages, and I wonder how GettyImages would cope? They probably would cope.
Photo museums and galleries would keep their collections safe on display, but I’m sure they’d have digital copies as well, or duplicate prints kept safe somewhere else, in case of fire.
I scanned every family photo I have into my hard drive, improved them digitally, printed them with a home printer, put all photos into two albums with names/places in date order, which I sent to my brother and cousin, and which in turn could be shared with their children and grandchildren, kept (hopefully) as part of the family record. My copy will remain in my hard drive.
If you want your non-family photos to be around for posterity’s sake, you could do all that yourself, which I’m assuming you are going to do anyway, but how would you store them away to be found a century later in a good state of preservation? Or were you speaking metaphorically?
Yes, but not breathing them in like one did in the darkroom.
You claim to be interested in analogue photography, but it seems as though your take on it is just very low resolution point and shoot snapping. If that’s all you want to do fine, but that’s not where myself and the other posters are at.
So why opt for the definitive 35mm half frame point and shoot rangefinder?
If you want to be ‘romantic’ about retro analogue photography and are ‘able to handle any camera’ an old Russian Zorki 4 seems a much more interesting cheap choice (and of course the negs are twice as large). But if you’re really looking for the romance of analogue, I think you need to do your own developing and printing, rather than just taking it to the chemist, or whatever is the modern equivalent.
Obviously you don’t see any need to, whereas I for instance appreciate being able to correct converging parallax verticals.
Similar regrets about a 5x4 Super Graphic I had in the late Seventies, love big negs and prints,
Should maybe consider building a camera obscura. Have seen a couple of unusual ones in S Africa’s semi desert Karoo (very bright light). One was a deserted cottage with a lens in the outside wall of very room that projected a faded-out inverted view of what was outside. The other was a rusty old abandoned shipping container with a bullet hole in one of the doors whose focal length turned it into a sort of Mad Max telephoto camera obscura.
@_Brian You might already know of, or have this book it’s one of my favourites on the extremes of imaging written by an artist, who’s also a very sharp critical thinker.
James Elkins, Six Stories from the End of Representation Tthe cheapest copy find is at:-
I think about thirty or possibly more years ago, Polaroid made a camera whose images were either 12 or 16 feet high - it was used in art restoration and apparently these large Polaroids could pick up detail that wasn’t visible when looking directly at the subject
I guess that made up for all the ‘slightly low resolution’ images every other camera they offered produced. My grandfather bought a polaroid when I was a youngish lad, and after all the excitement of an instant picture, I remember looking at the image and thinking how poor it was. I’ve hated polaroid output ever since, and cannot imagine why anyone would ever wish to use their film other than for chimping in the days before digital when shooting in the studio.
A lab I worked in around 1990-95 used purpose-made polaroid cameras for image recording of polyacrylamide gels to go in lab books, and even for such low resolution work they were simply dreadful.
I read that at least one major gallery/museum in the UK is photographing digital prints on to film for exactly this reason. Good luck reading a current jpeg or raw file in 100 years. And I’m sure the advent of digital will drastically cut the number of historical images available to future generation. Most of them will be in landfill along with all the “old” smartphones
I’m as bad a culprit as anyone. I developed and printed any number of B&W photos when I was in the newspaper industry (when there was such a thing) and as a hobby. Sadly, I’m digital-only now. Pentax has brought out a DSLR that takes only B&.W photos. Leica did something similar. Users seem to feel it gives better result than post-processing colour images into mono.
I have a Speed graphic I will be selling soon. I never ended up using it. It is a little tatty but I think it works okay. Had been going to get a Kodak Aero ektar lens but never did.
I also have a Crown Graphic that I used quite a lot and that I will keep.
I have a De Vere 504 enlarger that is taking up quite a bit of space in my studio which is a bit frustrating as I am not using it anymore. Maybe when my dogs are old…
Gosh! You certainly prioritised quality. Unfortunately we don’t have space for a dark room. Hope you get good money for all that kit
My current photo projects are digital, but the drone photos have stalled so to speak because the pilot now lives much further away. Also life’s getting in the way, currently trying to finish two bathrooms and a spiral staircase.
Meanwhile Sonja’s managed to get her SIRET and URSAF Rproblems sorted.
