The quiet, unobtrusive nature of change struck me recently when, on returning from an extended overseas trip, I realised that for the first time ever I had not packed an analogue camera of any description. On further reflection, it occurred to me that more than a year had passed since last I dropped a roll of film into my trusty vintage Nikon FM.

From the Archive: Don’s Editorial, Photo Review Issue 8 Dec/Jan 2003
The quiet, unobtrusive nature of change struck me recently when, on returning from an extended overseas trip, I realised that for the first time ever I had not packed an analogue camera of any description. On further reflection, it occurred to me that more than a year had passed since last I dropped a roll of film into my trusty vintage Nikon FM.

The change just crept up on me. For the last five years I’ve been making fewer and fewer analogue photos. But the number of times I’ve looked through a viewfinder and pressed a shutter button has not diminished significantly. It’s just that the balance between analogue and digital images has been moving steadily in the latter’s favour as my successive digital cameras have delivered ever more ø¢â‚¬Ëœphotographic’ results.

The print used to be the thing.
Like almost every photographer of my vintage, I spent long hours in the darkroom working to produce the perfect black and white print. It was fun and it could be intensely rewarding when everything came together in exactly the way one wanted. But it was not something you just did. Every printing session was preceded by the tedium of mixing chemicals, preparing trays and so on. During the process, solutions needed to be monitored for activity and temperature after every few prints. And then there were those endless test strips.
With digital photography, I find that the ø¢â‚¬Ëœprint as object’ approach no longer seems quite so important. Many of my photos are not printed at all but instead are emailed to friends or posted on websites. Those that do get printed are typically sent to an inexpensive colour inkjet in my home office. On rare occasions, I’ve arranged to have a digital print produced on photo paper.

In a very real sense, my photographs have become more ephemeral. Because I know that the digital file itself can be used to create a new print whenever I wish, the issue of print durability and archival keeping quality is much less important to me than once it was. A hand-produced black and white print is not simply a positive version of the original negative, it is in itself a product of numerous decisions made during the production process. As Ansel Adams once so aptly put it, a negative is like a musical score and the print is like a performance. But working digitally changes all that. I can make an exact duplicate of a digital original, transform it in my favourite editing software to match my photographic vision and then run out however many identical copies I want. As a photographer, my imagemaking ability is no longer hostage to my skills in the darkroom. True, I have to learn the techniques of image editing, but software tools are precise and consistent in a way that paper and chemistry cannot be. In effect, score and performance have become one.

Technical Editor Margaret Brown observes that even as digital photography makes imagery more ephemeral, it also makes it more ubiquitous. Describing them as ø¢â‚¬Ëœvisual notetakers’, she contends that the new generation of tiny, inexpensive and comparatively low resolution cameras such as Sony’s UC10 or the Casio Exilim series are making it easier than ever for people to create and share still images on a casual basis.

At the moment most of these visual notes are exchanged via email, but before long they will start appearing on high resolution colour displays that will soon be available on everything from PDAs to mobile phones. Once you have the camera and a device on which to view the images, the production cost of a photo is reduced to nothing more than whatever your data transmission charges may be.
Just as meticulous photographers keep black and white prints in acid-free sleeves and colour negatives in sealed and frozen storage, so too, careful digital photographers need to have a consistent and coherent data storage and replication strategy. My practice is to maintain a copy of my digital originals on my computer’s hard drive so that they can be quickly and easily accessed, while at the same time also writing the data to at least two separate CD-ROMs. It’s called digital asset management by the IT gurus, and in our next issue we will take an in-depth look at the best strategies for ensuring your digital images survive into the distant future.
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