Monday, February 23, 2009

Web Galleries to the Rescue

Last time I expressed the view that no foolproof mechanism for long term preservation of digital images seems to have emerged. For that matter, the same problem remains unsolved for ALL forms of digital data. Just how should one archive one's files for the medium to long term, confident that the digital media itself will have survived and that means will still be at hand to interpret the file and storage formats?

Well the answer is .... I don't know!!!! I just hope that someone else, much smarter than yours truly, DOES - or if they don't, that they soon will. It is a huge problem getting still larger by the minute.

Traditionally we viewed our images on photopaper, usually stored in photo albums. Once closed, the album storage format enables our prints to be protected from light and history shows that they can be preserved for very long periods indeed. Perhaps long term preservation of important images should remain in that form - on long life paper, in long life inks in books. But then just what do we mean by "important".

Going down through the ages, past our children and grandchildren, we reach descendants who will never have actually met us, interracted with us, spoken with us - or indeed have especially much interest in us and our lives at all. To them, pictures of our overseas trip to Bali in 2009 (including pictures of me posing next to the colourfully dressed hotel doorman) will hardly loom large in importance. Is it really so vital that such images survive? Beyond our lifespan and perhaps our children's, will anyone ever want to look at them again? In the final analysis, who are our images FOR?

The answer, of course, is that they are mostly for us - OURSELVES. Most especially they are for our twilight years when we will have the time for indulgent nostalgia sessions and when images of our early years and those of our forbears acquire a meaning and importance they never had during the hustle and bustle times of youth, early parenthood and career building.

In truth, most of our personal "good time" pictures can safely die WITH us.

Pictures of our children and grandchildren however, will need to live on down the years to be enjoyed and appreciated during the twilight years of SUBSEQUENT generations. Perhaps therefore, our only real image obligations are to our children. We should merely be obliged to ensure that our CHILDREN get the pictures that will remain of interest to them. Let THEM battle the vagiaries of future data storage/archive systems.

In any event, are images becoming less and less important as a whole?

Our generation comes at the end of a series of generations for whom photographs were a relatively precious commodity. Not everyone owned or used cameras. Professional shoots, film and processing cost real money. In my youth, significant occasions with my family are remembered by one or two images at best. Some significant relatives like my Uncle Earnest are remembered by one or two images IN ALL. The images which remain of such times and individuals are relatively few and commensurately valuable.

These days it seems quite different. EVERYONE has a digital camera. There are cameras in mobile phones, for heaven sake. Images arrive by phone call and email everyday - "Here's me and my new boyfriend hanging out at Tim's party" - "Here are sixteen pictures of the new puppy" - "Here's a dozen pictures of the new car" - "Look who we just ran into, down at the mall ... Sandra ... haven't seen her in days" - "Look at Bob's funny hat" - "Here's Sue spilling an ice cream on her new sweater".

Effectively, images today are FREE and so we capture them with total abandon. Most such pictures are intended for immediate viewing and disposal. In our present culture, images grow more and more numerous, more transient, more trivial and less treasured. The trouble and time associated with printing, mounting and preservation can often seem pointless.

When a photograph was taken in days of yore, it was taken with intent. All of them were important. If it hadn't been important we would never have taken it in the first place. Today things are decidedly different. Nonetheless even today's youth may eventually have sober moments and decide that certain images have a value beyond the moment. What should they do with them?

Web based galleries seem the way to go. They are becoming immensely popular and as a concept seem destined to survive the next human generation or so. Today it is possible to establish FREE galleries. Some gallery sites offered guaranteed preservation of uploaded images. Some sites like Pbase seem perfect for hobbiests whose pages can be highly customised and (like all web galleries) offer instantaneous display to international enthusiasts.

With web galleries, any relative in the world can immediately see all the images of our grandchild's birthday party, last Tuesday. Masses of old family photographs can be displayed for any relative to download or share. Our memories can be preserved no matter how quickly the bushfire comes to destroy our home. All of our artistic image attempts can be appreciated by others (anywhere in the world), who can upload encouraging comments as well.

Maybe - just maybe - web galleries are the preservation and sharing medium of choice ... at least for now .... I hope.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Looking at Pictures

Time was that if you wanted to see the family pictures, you went fishing around in the back of some out-of-the-way cupboard and eventually emerged with several well worn old-style photo albums. Blowing off the dust, you opened the tomes to reveal hundreds of old family memories going back generations.

Each time you returned to the albums, the black and white prints had turned just a fraction more sepia and the colour prints just a fraction more faded - but we remembered what the tones and colours really were supposed to be so it didn't matter ... too much.

Then of course back in the sixties and early seventies we all got modern and started taking coloured slides and could watch our family memories sort of like we were at the movies. Of course it began to dawn on us that slide shows frequently became tedious for the "trapped" visitors, effectively bolted into position before a seemingly endless parade of excruciating, underexposed, overexposed, blurry, pictures of frequently decapitated people they didn't especially care about. Likewise slideshows involved far too much trouble to be an entirely practical method for casual viewing.

To make the problem still worse, we discovered that many transparencies faded dreadfully. By the beginning of the nineties, many of my precious slides from the sixties had pretty much faded to a uniform blue - especially the Agfa, Ansco and Fuji ones. Remarkably the actual Kodachrome slides (not so much the Ectachromes) had endured pretty well.

In any event, these days, masses of families are urgently scanning what remains of their transparencies into digital form where their colours can be preserved or even restored a little. Lots of people, too, are methodically scanning their old prints. The biggest difficulty lies in finding someone who has the necessary combination of skill, patience, time, familiarity and affection for the task.

Just when we started to think that the problems associated with preserving our ancestral images had at last been solved (i.e. scanning to digital), brand new problems begin to emerge - sigh!

While slides had barely lasted 20 years, some of the oldest of our prints have lasted 150 years to date. How long will digital images last (and that includes our current images direct from our digital cameras)? The immediate, reflex answer is "forever", but is that really the case?

Once digitised, of course, images can be enhanced before being printed afresh. But how long will the new prints actually last? We have just lived through a period of 15 years during which photograph printing technology has undergone massive change - not always for the better. Unfortunately a lot of 10 year old prints (even those from SOME commercial labs) are simply fading to nothing. Over the last 5 years or so, the performance of new prints would appear to be rather better - especially those produced at home where "chrome pigments" and "archive" papers promise genuinely long life. The trouble is we don't know for sure - simply because the current methods and materials are too new.

Then there is the matter of digital image storage. Our local hard drives are hardly suitable. Hard drives last three to four years at best and frequently not as long as that. Back up drives are okay in the short term. I have two back up HDs for my main drive and get by on the hope that all three drives are unlikely to crash simultaneously ... they wouldn't .. would they??? After that I download to "archive" DVD-Rs. I produce multiple copies at any one time and hope to high heaven that my ancestors will not find them to have become meaningless plastic junk in 20 years time. If that is INDEED the case, the much hyped digital format and storage will have performed still worse than slides!

Deteriorating and unreliable digital storage is a very real fear. Experiments on present technology recordable CDs and DVDs suggest that long term reliance on such devices might well be fraught with danger. Even if the disks themselves survive the years intact, how do we know that the means will remain at hand to retrieve data from them? Think back to the relative technological instability of the IT industry. File and storage formats come and go like the wind. 8 inch floopy disks gave way to 5.25" mini-floppies and then to 3.5" hard case floppies and then to "Iomega Zip" disks and then to "Iomega Jazz" disks and then to recordable CDs, mini-CDs, DVDs and blueray DVDs and then to "flash memory" devices such as SD cards, CF cards and "memory sticks" etc ad nauseum.

In 20 years time, god alone knows what the (then) universally accepted digital storage media and/or imagefile formats will be?

Far from living in a technological golden age, we live at a time when we can't even be certain that our great grandchildren will be able to see our photographs.

But wait! Perhaps there IS a solution after all .... but that is for next time.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Light is a Harsh Mistress

Like most people who use cameras, I find myself constantly bitching about the light. What a delight it is when you find yourself in the right place at the right time with the ideal light for your purpose. Of course, in the matter of light, good photography is largely a matter of planning in which one tries to be at certain locations under certain lighting conditions.

Trouble is, at this time of year (mid-summer in the southern hemisphere) good outdoors lighting is hard to come by and potentially ideal light is really only available for a few hours at the beginning and the end of the day. "WHAT?" .... I hear you say. "Look out there. The sun is shining. Bright colours are to be found in every direction. There is a lovely blue sky. Start shooting quick."

The pity is that these latter statements are just not true. At the height of summer, in the middle of the day where I live, the light is quite appalling for good pictures. The sun is effectively directly overhead for much of the day. This means that the tops of people's heads, the roofs of houses, the crowns of trees are all beautifully lit by the sun (from the direction of the sun) while the sides of all of those things (from the photographer's perspective) are composed of broken shadow.

The strength of the sun is such that highlights are extremely bright while shadows are very dark meaning that most idle pictures of the squinting relatives lined up at the beach barbecue are dominated by shadows which render the faces indecipherable. At the same time, the sand and all whitish objects are a featureless blown out haze. Terrific picture ... NOT!

If one were to shoot pictures between (say) 7 and 9 am or (say) between 4 and 6 pm, the situation is a great deal better. At those times of the day, the sun lights things from the side, enabling more saturated and consistent colours. Face your human subjects away from the sun and many good things start to happen. For a start they stop squinting in the glare, their faces and fronts are in consistent shadow allowing reliable exposure. Fill in flash can brighten the faces moderately and the whole picture improves out of sight.

In winter, the situation is much better. The sun is softer and comes from an angle ALL DAY. Highlights and shadows can BOTH be captured and the limits of camera dynamic range are not generally threatened. Most importantly, if you devote a day to go somewhere interesting for the purpose of taking pictures, you can keep shooting ALL DAY and take your time while doing so. You can get many more useful images of a location because you don't have to stop shooting between (say) 9 am and 4 pm and find some halfway useful thing to fill in your time meanwhile.

People who look at my "Photo a Day" gallery on Pbase will note that there is currently a paucity of scenic pictures. Most of my summer hobby images tend to be close ups and indoor locations because outdoor pictures are much too tedious to plan in what is presently a busy lifestyle.

See my work at www.pbase.com/davidhobbs