P3D Lasting Images (was: Value of Photography)

[Bob Wier <wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

|Besides stereo, one of my other photographic interests is collecting 
|old movie projectors. Occassionally I acquire someone's home movies
|along with a machine. They are often a marvelous record of how people
|lived, dressed, got married, died, etc.
|
|There ought to be someplace that is a repository of such images as
|a social record.
|
|I suspect that, in the long run, the period of photo-chemical imaging
|is going to be the only era so-documented. Magnetic recording materials,
|and their recording conventions are too ephemeral to be preserved.
|
|Norm Lehfeldt
|

As a technology watcher, I've been warning colleagues for years about
recording baby pictures (et al) on video tape, although it's holding
up better that expected (I have some VHS from 1979 which still plays
ok if I tweek the roller alignment on my player). However, the medium
is so fragile that I fear there will be a tremendous gap in visual
history from about 1975 till the widespread use of digital imagery
comes about. Unfortunately there really isn't any alternate option
for "home movies" left at the current time.

One argument against CD-ROMS is of course that even if their life span is
in the 100 year range, there may not be any PLAYERS available for them.
However, the counter - argument is that since they are in digital format,
they can be copied without loss of quality to new media as necessary as
the technology changes. There are also arguments that the resolution is
too low to be usable, but that will certainly be fixed within the next
few years (IMHO). 

I might note that the next major step forward in storage technology
is likely to be molecular level based media. I hear from colleagues
that use of a solid state crystalline substance and lasers will give
a quantum leap (pardon the pun) forward in information storage density,
perhaps in 10 years if nothing goes seriously wrong. 

One perhaps overlooked aspect of digital storage however is that since
you have to figure that images *will* have to be copied to different
media, it will cause an on-going expense to preserve them. Thus 
images which could be considered "marginal" might be lost since they 
would not be preserved due to the copying expense (this is happening
right now with the decomposition of nitrite based motion picture film,
and the cost to transfer it to a more stable media - Bob H can probably
comment on this). The difficulity is that historical values change on
images - a street scene from the 1970s at this point is merely an old
picture, whereas 100 years from now it will likely be of rather large
interest - but it might not have been preserved due to the low interest
in the '90's, say. As a collector of stereoviews, I have a LARGE interest
in street scenes in the Rockies, but you don't really see that many of
them because they were probably boring at the time (since all you had
to do was to go downtown to see the same thing). The only exceptions
are for unusual events or tourist areas where people wanted pictures
to show the folk back home. 

Myself, I'm covering as many bases as possible, so I've transferred
the 8mm kodachrome movie film from my parent's era onto videotape 
as it's now brittle and prone to fading on projection, but I'm ALSO
keeping it safely stored away under the best conditions I can arrange
as a function of value vs cost. On photos from before the turn of the
century, I've made copy photos AND digital scans of them. My realist
slides are a problem since they are expensive and difficult to copy, and
a major pain to scan...

FWIW...

               Bob Wier
         mailto:wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  07:35 PM  Friday, November 14, 1997
     Rocky Mountain College, Billings MT.
 keeper of the Photo-3d and Overland-Trails
mailing lists and the USA GPS Waypoint server 



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