Issue #0506/1 - As printer manufacturers persuade us to print every photo, and may accuse us of losing or forgetting our photos if we don’t, we look at why they are anything but lost.
Over the last six months or so, I have been aware of an advertising campaign on the television that uses the catch phrase “Let me out”.
Technically, it is quite a clever advertisement where action scenes (e.g. throwing confetti at a wedding, child swinging) have been frozen into still photographs but the subject of the photo has been allowed enough movement to make their plea.
Alerted to something unusual in her house by the sound of someone knocking on glass, which turns out to be the LCD screen of her digital camera, the main character in the advertisement (a mother) picks up her camera and sees the first of these frozen action shots – a small boy at the edge of a swimming pool saying “Let me out”!
Another shot is of girl suspended at the fullest extent of a garden swing, saying, “I’m bored”.
To begin with I just let it all flow over me and enjoyed the technical excellence of the advertisement and the fact that it was advertising a piece of hardware that was of interest to me – the Epson PictureMate.
Some while later though, I was browsing the web sites of some of the main printer manufacturers when I came across a page on the Lexmark site that was titled ‘Forgotten Photos’. The executive summary reads “Billions of forgotten photographs are lying unseen on hard drives, disks and cameras across Europe”.
They assume two things:
- firstly, that any photographs stored on hard drives, disks or in the camera are forgotten or lost!
- secondly, that photos in an album are viewed more frequently than photos on a hard disk!
The article (which is not new) quotes the curator of the National Museum of Photography as suggesting that unprinted photographs are les valid as an archive source than printed photographs.
But, are these suggestions and assumptions right? Is this the truth about photography and digital photography in particular?
I would certainly agree if we were talking about silver halide negatives and prints. Quite simply, the negative is incapable of being enjoyed by anyone without the conversion process into a paper print. A negative cannot even be projected onto a screen in the way that a slide can and so is ‘lost’ if it is not printed.
This takes me back to the days when I would spend hours in the darkroom developing my films and creating black and white prints. Frankly, my prints were not great – the technology of manipulation was very basic. I did manage to win a second prize in a university photo competition but it was less to do with the quality of the print and more to do with the subject matter (and perhaps the caption it was given). However, I can’t show it to you because I can’t find it!!
Even now, my best photos are ones where I have been able to capture character into the original photo and can portray that with the minimum of manipulation – whether they are viewed on screen or in hard copy.
It is quite true that I am enjoying displaying more photographs than ever before but, because digital technology reduces the cost of capturing the image, I am taking more – by a factor of at least 10x!
And that, in itself presents a problem!
Houses being built today (in the UK at least) are increasingly smaller and more tightly packed together than they were in previous decades and we tend to have more belongings than our forebears did. This has the result that space, and storage space in particular, is at a premium and can almost certainly be guaranteed to be fully utilised.
Almost regardless of age of house, many of us have to ask ourselves the question, “do I have the room and facilities to store or display tens of photo albums containing thousands of photos”?
An example – my mother, at the age of 78, has bought a digital camera in the last two weeks, having operated with a SLR and two zoom lenses for at least two decades. During that time she has collected dozens of albums containing memories of UK holidays and extended trips around the world.
Take the stereotype of the family’s photo storage – which is more accessible?
- shoe boxes under the stairs or in the bedroom cupboard, or
- digital files on a computer
Which is more transportable?
- shoe boxes under the stairs or in the bedroom cupboard, or
- digital files on a laptop
Let’s face it – scanner manufacturers (which are, after all, the same breed as the printer manufacturers!) having been trying to persuade us to scan our old, hidden, shoeboxes and albums full of silver halide photographs for posterity and for restoration!
Is this merely to reprint them on ink jet printers?
There will always be instances where a hard copy photograph cannot be replaced by a digital file but the future for the majority of photographs is digital and hard copy will be preserved largely for wall, countertop or desktop display.
Even sharing memories with the family is easier in digital format.
- Manufacturers are increasingly pushing home projectors as digital home entertainment takes a grip on society
- Laptops (or our portable storage devices) allow us to carry our photos with us
- Epson has a portable photo viewer in its line-up, and
- Now that my mother will be equipped with a computer, I will be able to email my parents our special photographs (which will not be printed unless they want a copy above the fireplace for a while), or
- I am able to give family and friends access to password protected web sites where they can view all our photos compiled into digital web albums with easy hierarchical topic selection or a search facility
Accessibility – is digital! Photos are lost if they are inaccessible.
Albums are fine as long as storage space is not an issue but there is nothing more inaccessible than a bunch of loose photos stuffed into a shoebox and hidden in a cupboard where they cannot even be found easily, let alone taken on travels to be shared with those we love.
~End~
