Blog
Something to Think About - 6/17/2008
Every day we receive old photos from people to process, enlarge, restore, or copy. I always marvel at the quality of these old negatives or photos. Most times we can enlarge them to 16x20, 20x24 or larger. It seems the older the negative the more confidence I have in the image quality and our ability to give the customer a stunning print of their great grandparents or historical event.
Fast forward to today’s historian. The family member who has an interest in photography and has a digital camera. Billions of digital pictures are being taken every year. More than ever before. Only about 5% are ever printed professionally. Most are sitting on hard drives or camera memory cards. Several generations from now the future family historian will have little to work with. There will be no shoe boxes full of old negatives and rejected pictures, discarded, but still saved. It’s so hard to throw out a photo of someone you know. Decades latter these negatives and photos take on new importance and meaning. But what of the digital image? Nobody really knows. How many memories will be carelessly deleted while still in the camera. Maybe they will be put onto a hard drive. If they survive the computer upgrade or are lucky to be burned to a DVD, before the drive crashes, will they be stored in a safe place? Will they be recopied before the DVD detoriates? What about the distribution of one’s positions when a death occurs? Will a DVD full of images be discarded because future computers no longer use DVD’s? Will anyone 60 years from now know what a DVD is? I bet they will still recognize a old shoe box full of photos, and spend some time going through it. Nobody knows the life span of images stored on a DVD. 10years, 20? Certainly not 70, 80, or 100 years.
This is why it is so important to get your images printed. Think of it as a hard copy backup, a digital negative. An image printed on silver halide paper will last 200 years. It can be copied and enlarged to large sizes without any loss in quality. No other media can do this. None. Ink jet prints, either from a home printer or from one of those new dry photo labs, cannot do this. One must be careful when choosing where to have their digital images printed. Some one hour photo labs print at minimal resolution to give a acceptable 4x6, but no more. Check it out with a magnifier. If the image looks pixilated or fuzzy at 6-8x magnification it will not make a good enlarged copy. We have people coming in who have a ink jet “original” print, have lost or deleted the image file and need a copy or enlargement. They are usually disappointed when they come back in to pick up the copy. It’s not as clear, often has lines going across it, and has jagged edges. It’s not like the old prints or negatives. We at Darkroom Imaging use silver halide paper, print at maximum resolution, and make memories last.
