The Death of Film

[binsurf]

While the title of my topic is somewhat terse and abrupt, there is truth in it. I recently viewed a set of photos of the Kodak film department buildings and they sank my heart. Kodak, the ingenious brainchild of Mr. Eastman, invented modern photography and also assisted with the development of digital photography. Without Kodak, we might not have had handheld cameras we could take with us everywhere. Before Kodak, photographers were relegated to the back of a large box on a tripod.

Film was a beautiful medium. And though I was quick to take up digital photography, I am sad to see it's father company fade away into the mist of antiquity. When I started into photography 20 years ago, I used my Dad's Yashica FX3 35mm SLR with a 35-70mm zoom and I used black and white film and learned how to develop it. My favourite was the T-MAX 400. Gorgeous film and it had amazing latitude for push processing. It was also very tolerant both in handling and also in developing. It had rich blacks and a gorgeous gamut of greys to white. Kodak's development chemicals were genius as well, since, you could reuse it by applying a developer refresher chemical. Develop, stop, fix, rinse. That was the photoshop of the age. Dodge and burn were physical applications during enlargement. I still have all my equipment. I can't seem to let it go. There is no use for it anymore.

I know, there are still companies making film. Fujifilm still makes it, but I'm not aware of any others, though I'm sure there are more. But, the demise of Kodak in the film sense, is but the tip of the film age iceberg.

Farewell, fair medium, I shall miss the intimate time we had.

[rpcrowe]

Of course, I shot with film for the first fourty yers or so of my photography lifetime. However after my first digital DSLR (Canon 10D) I never shot a frame of film again.

IMO digital is so far superior to film in many respects that I just wish it had been around my entire photographic career.

As an example, I was shooting in Hong Kong during the day and decided to shoot the light show from the Kowloon side. I got there a bit late and found myself in the rear of an immense crowd. This negated the use of a tripod and forced me to shoot hand-held, over the heads of the crowd in front of me (it's nice to be tall in a country of shorter statured persons). I jacked up the ISO to 1,600 and had the IS on my 17-55mm lens turned on and got some nice shots shooting at 1/15 to 1/45 second at f/2.8. And this was using an older Canon 30D!

No way could I have done that with film.

Additionally, unfortunately many if not most of the color prints shot and processed in the 1960's and 1970's are tending to fade out. I seriously thing that we are in danger of losing a generation of snapshots with the personal histories of many families recorded.

[binsurf]

Archival capabilities is where digital falls short. How do you know in 20, 50, or 100 years from now your shot will still be viewable? 100 years ago, there are photos that are still viewable and clear. Fading and destruction are the fault of the archiver, not the medium. Slides have a major foot up on archiving.

[groovesection]

Fair point but i do not buy it, I have studio created music tracks which were created on Octamed (on the Amiga) and still reside on floppy disks.
I can easily run them on an emulator allowing me to access the tracks and export them.
With regards to JPEGS this is even easier and i doubt very much an industry standard like JPEG will ever become obsolete and there will always be people who will code an emulator to allow viewing/printing etc.

[binsurf]

Anything store on magnetic media will degrade irreparably and unstoppably. Where will you store your jpgs? Will it be accessible 50 years from now?

[groovesection]

Then you simply store on a cloud system

[Bobobird]

It is not dead. For some reason there seems to be a resurgence in film use.

[binsurf]

Then you simply store on a cloud system

Run by companies that can fail. My point is, is that we need better archiving. The best bet is to print your best photos. Paper has a significant longevity. It can survive quite some time. But, only if printed correctly.

[binsurf]

It is not dead. For some reason there seems to be a resurgence in film use.

Perhaps because of it's demise? Like polaroid had when it was being discontinued in 2008? Or vinyl records last year?

[groovesection]

Run by companies that can fail. My point is, is that we need better archiving. The best bet is to print your best photos. Paper has a significant longevity. It can survive quite some time. But, only if printed correctly.

Fair point, but to say they can fail is laughable, Ever heard of data centres and raid arrays?
During the recent storm in the US imgbox went down but remarkably all there servers are back up and functioning with no loss of data
Do you seriously believe a big company would have 1 data centre and no back ups? lol

[binsurf]

Do you seriously think a company will run for 50 years? Perhaps some, but what if the one you chose doesn't? What if cloud computing doesn't take off as it seems it should? There are all kinds of security issues with it and reliability. Amazon, Microsoft, both have clouds that failed.

[davidedric]

It IS sad to see its slow demise. I, too, have little faith in clouds and back ups if my life depended on it. But surely the key difference is in copies. There can only ever be one true copy of a film, but any number of a digital image. However, I confidently expect both to outlast me!

[groovesection]

Do you seriously think a company will run for 50 years? Perhaps some, but what if the one you chose doesn't? What if cloud computing doesn't take off as it seems it should? There are all kinds of security issues with it and reliability. Amazon, Microsoft, both have clouds that failed.

Fair points Jim, I think we should agree to disagree on this issue otherwise this could become a thread of ping pong between our views on this matter

[binsurf]

Fair points Jim, I think we should agree to disagree on this issue otherwise this could become a thread of ping pong between our views on this matter

LOL, agreed! Especially since I'm not good at ping-pong.

[Manfred M]

Anything store on magnetic media will degrade irreparably and unstoppably. Where will you store your jpgs? Will it be accessible 50 years from now?

Funny, the same thing has happened to my negatives and slides that were properly stored in a cool dark place. Film deteriorates as well.

[pnodrog]

Is there a doctor in the house. This lot has been in the fridge for over six years and I could not find a pulse. Need a detective as well because about 6 rolls of velvia are missing. My son borrowed my F90x so maybe that is a clue.

[FrankMi]

WOW Paul, images of the fast stuff! Back when I was shooting the occasional roll of colour, the typical ASA was 25!

[pnodrog]

WOW Paul, images of the fast stuff! Back when I was shooting the occasional roll of colour, the typical ASA was 25!

The velvia that is missing was 50 ASA and that big can of slide dup film is about 20 ASA but from memory it is not rated that way.

[Andrew1]

Coincidentally....

http://technology.canoe.ca/2012/11/07/20337796.html

Proper backup doesn't mean just downloading data and forgetting about it. Proper backups will evolve the data as the technology changes. It's up to the user, based on the media lifeline among other things, to determine when to do it, what data is to survive and the method to do that. In a business environment weekly backups and monthly rotation of all pertinent data is certainly not unusual. For a photographer it would be simple to do. It just comes down to how much time and $$$ you want to commit.

And I still have loads of TMAX, BW400CN and HP5 in the fridge.

[Bobobird]

Perhaps because of it's demise? Like polaroid had when it was being discontinued in 2008? Or vinyl records last year?

Could be.

According to my friend who owns a developing shop, he sees lots of young people doing it. The price of old film lens has rocketed over the past 2-3 years so there is a resurgence going on. Either being adapted for digital or being used on film, probably both.