Do you print and archive your digital pictures?

[fatoddsun]

Last night I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine, who is also a big analog photography supporter, and who's been developing his film in his darkroom for thirty odd years.
The conversation started with the fact that a negative is a "document" on its own, and does not rely on any encoding or specific technology to be read. A negative will always be "telling a story", and people will be able to look at it and reproduce it because it's already an image, as opposed to a JPEG file, that is nothing without a computer and a technology that allows us to light pixels on a screen according to that encoded information.

On a slightly less philosophical note, we were discussing that analog photography "forces" us to develop pictures and create the final document that will be with us and we'll look at later on in our lives, whereas the digital photography process often stops too early, that is at the moment the JPEG is produced.

I am a "digital photographer", but I have to say I also believe that pictures should eventually become "tangible" by being impressed/printed on a piece of paper. Some people compare the analog darkroom to the modern "lightroom", where we look at our raw shots and make the final adjustments, but I reckon that the traditional darkroom should instead be compared with both the lightroom and the printing stage.
Nevertheless, I struggle quite a lot in finding the will/time/way of doing so with most of my images, which are stuck on a hard drive forever. I am in fact contemplating the possibility of going through all my pictures, shortlist them, and print them to archive on paper, and collect in albums.

What is your view on photography printing? I'm not talking about those few pictures that we really like and which make it to a big print to be hung on a wall or to be jealously kept in a folder. I'm thinking more of all those pictures that we love because they represent a specific memory in our lives, and that we would love to look at again and again through the years.

I'd be interested in hearing what people think about this topic.

Damiano

[Shadowman]

Before I purchased a wide format printer 2years ago, I would print most of my images 8.5" x 14" or 8.5" x 11" and would show perhaps a dozen of those prints to friends. It became much easier and I still do typically display using a 10" tablet. When I or someone else wanted a large version I would have the image file sent to a lab for printing, now I do most of my own printing, up to 17" wide and I do archive my prints.

[royent]

I print thumbnails of all my photos even the duff ones which I file in transparent sleeves. I keep JPEGs on a CD. I number the CDs and print the number of the CD on the relevant page of thumbnails. All RAW files are kept on a stand alone hard drive. in files with the same number.
Roy

[pschlute]

I'm not talking about those few pictures that we really like and which make it to a big print to be hung on a wall

Damiano

This is what I do with a few pictures each year. Every few months I get a new one printed at 24x16 " and put it in the frame. Or I have a set printed of a portrait shoot that I do for friends dogs.

I do not see the purpose to print everything. My media is digital... phone ipad...computer. In the same way as I read my news online these days instead of buying a printed newspaper, i view and share my pictures electronically.

In a way this subject may be linked to recent ones about cataloguing your digital images. If you have a system where it is very easy to view and find photos from a specific day or of a specific subject, you may, like me, find it an odd idea to print all your pictures. However if one does not have a good "virtual photo album" or indeed use digital media as often as I do, it may be more attractive to be able to view a hard copy.

[DanK]

A negative will always be "telling a story", and people will be able to look at it and reproduce it because it's already an image, as opposed to a JPEG file, that is nothing without a computer and a technology that allows us to light pixels on a screen according to that encoded information.

On a slightly less philosophical note, we were discussing that analog photography "forces" us to develop pictures and create the final document that will be with us and we'll look at later on in our lives, whereas the digital photography process often stops too early, that is at the moment the JPEG is produced.

I don't think this comparison is accurate, and it isn't going to help resolve your dilemma.

First, unless you are more talented than I am, negatives don't tell a story. Back in my wet-darkroom days, I don't think I knew anyone who could consistently visualize positives from negatives. That's why we all printed contact sheets. Second, the darkroom wasn't just for printing; it was necessarily where a lot of the creative process happened. One didn't dodge and burn negatives. Also,
analog didn't force people to create a final image. Many images got tossed after an examination of the negatives, and far more got trashed after the production of a contact sheet.

However, I don't think that this helps at all to resolve what each of us decides to do with our digital images. I think that is a real dilemma for many of us because digital allows us to produce so much. I'm one of those people who vastly prefers a physical print to an online image--even when I am using my color-critical monitor. I get a great deal of satisfaction from producing a print. However, I don't need all that many prints to hang, give away, or show in competitions, and there are many other images beyond those that I would enjoy seeing as prints. So I have been mulling over printing some images and just storing them in portfolio boxes so that I can from time to time look at them and show them to people.

I do a lot of candid photography, mostly of kids. I print very few. The people I give the images to are generally quite happy with the digital versions and don't want many prints. I just print the occasional exceptional one.

[Manfred M]

I am likely the most prolific printer in the group at CiC and also started as a colour and black and white printer in the "wet" darkroom.

First of all, let me strongly disagree with your friend. Negatives and positives on traditional film do deteriorate over time, even when properly stored. My colour negatives and positives, with the possible exception of Kodachrome have deteriorated fairly significantly. The same can be said for many of the colour prints, again with the exception of the Cibachrome / Ilfochrome ones. Unfortunately the dyes used in films and prints do break down.

The B&W work has fared better and those examples are still in reasonable shape. That being said, I did not generally print on archival paper and the old B&W prints done on the baryta papers of the time are in variable health. I don't have any RC prints around to see how they have fared, but these were designed for short wash cycles and in theory would have fewer residual chemicals to cause archival problems. That being said, all resins yellow with age as the stabilizers break down, so I have no doubts that some damage does occur.

I did not wear gloves when handling negatives and even the tiny amounts of oils transferred from my skin has caused some damage as well.

When it comes to digital negatives, we do have the issue of "digital rot", i.e. outdated technology making they technology unreadable due to either changes in format or devices themselves. Early digital technologies are obsolete. My early tape backup is useless because neither the drives nor the tapes are being manufactured. My early floppy drives can no longer be read as no one manufactures these drives anymore. Optical drives (CD, DVD and BluRay) are going to die out. My old ESDI hard drives are no longer supported on new computer mainboards and have been replaced by SATA drives, so I can no longer read data from these either. The only solution appears to be to continually archive these old files using newer technology to prevent losing the images. I use RAID drives (two independent RAID units) plus local storage for my images. The most important ones are stored "in the cloud".

That takes me to the world of prints. As was pointed out by Damiano, no special devices or technology are required to retrieve and read them. I started a personal project about two years ago where I try to print at least two small A4 / 8-1/2" x 11" a week. Often I will do Super A3+ (13" x 19") and 432mm x 559mm / 17" x 22" as well. I have archival storage boxes and separator paper for these formats. I do generally identify the place, subject and date taken in a small font on the margins. That way they can be matted and framed and still retain some level of history.

Modern inkjet printer(pigment) ink sets and archival papers will certainly outlast me, if the images are well stored. Life is well into the hundreds of years. Yes poor storage, fire, flood and other natural and man-made disasters can destroy these too, but there is only so much effort I am willing to take here.

[fatoddsun]

Thank you all for sharing your views and approaches to printing.
I think I will try to keep as little images as possible on my hard drive, and print even a smaller subset of these. I prefer to print very few images in favour of a better quality, to be sure that the images I care about are faithfully represented and last through the years.

[Manfred M]

Thank you all for sharing your views and approaches to printing.
I think I will try to keep as little images as possible on my hard drive, and print even a smaller subset of these. I prefer to print very few images in favour of a better quality, to be sure that the images I care about are faithfully represented and last through the years.

Damiano - I generally shoot between 20,000 and 40,000 pictures per year. I probably print somewhere between 200 and 400 images per year (I'm writing about final prints, and do not count the test prints). Depending on the complexity of the shot, I will generally spend at least 30 minutes retouching an image. Often I will spend a couple of hours working on a single image to get it ready for print, especially if it is going into an exhibition or print competition. This is usually done over a period of between a day to a week as I will do numerous test prints and revisit an image many times before I consider it to be "print ready". I usually have about 5 or 6 images in various stages of prep at any one time.

[xpatUSA]

Damiano - I generally shoot between 20,000 and 40,000 pictures per year.

Wow, Manfred! An average of 55-110 per day.

[Manfred M]

Wow, Manfred! An average of 55-110 per day.

That sounds about right.

When I am on the road traveling for a month or two I will easily shoot several hundred images a day. I've certainly exceeded that when shooting events as there are so few "keepers" in that type of shooting.

I just went back and checked my shot counts for this year (a very slow year shooting wise) and 2014 where we were doing a lot of traveling and shooting.

This year is going to be much lower than that as we have only done one major trip (to South America) where I came back with just under 5000 images. The two last major shoots I did, were just 300 shots each, so I am probably going to end up the year at around 10,000 shots and this will be the slowest year of shooting in the past 7 years.

In a busy year I will do one or two shoots a week plus two major trips and two smaller ones, so getting 20,000 shots is easy. The year we went to South Asia for two months (2014), I came back with just under 30,000 shots for that one trip alone. There were a couple of days there during the festivals where I shot close to 2,000 images / day. I think I ended up with over 40,000 shots that year as I shot around 2500 images the week we were in Guatemala earlier that year plus the usual weekly shooting that I do.

I'm actually one of the slower shooters in my group of photographers. There are quite a few that easily double my output. I have one friend who replaces his camera every three to four years because he wears out the shutter (60,000 - 80,000 shots per year range).

[fatoddsun]

Manfred, I don't know what group of photographers you are part of, but if it were true that taking a photo steals the soul of its subject, then you guys would be a public danger of colossal proportion

[Manfred M]

Manfred, I don't know what group of photographers you are part of, but if it were true that taking a photo steals the soul of its subject, then you guys would be a public danger of colossal proportion

Most of the people I shoot with are either members of one of the photography clubs I belong to or are part of a Meetup group that shoots a lot. The high image count photographers tend to be people who do a lot of studio work and on-location portraiture but one is very much a travel photographer, so he steals the soul of the landscapes. I'm kind of in the middle where I do a mix of landsscapes / urban landscapes and portraiture.

[Tronhard]

I have come to this one fairly late, so forgive my intrusion...

I started shooting back in the day with negative and transparency film, learning to do my own printing. However when I traveled and worked pretty much all of my output was on transparency as that is what was the market standard for me. I lost almost all of my work to vandalism and those few slides that have survived have, by and large, deteriorated somewhat over the years. For me, looking at the analogue media, the issue was storage - I traveled a lot and had to find safe places to put my stuff and then there was the issue of back up. I rejoiced when digital came along for that very reason.

When I have no problem accessing my digital images from my first ones because I still have the technology to access them - I still have a couple of old computers with the drives and software to use my oldest mass storage devices, but also as Manfred said, I have archived my files to succeeding generations of hardware and so far all my files can be read by my current software - so I am good.

I share my images digitally with family and friends because that is the medium they want to accept them on - they are, if you will, my clients. On the few occasions when i have wanted to record a series of images on hard-copy for distribution (holidays, family events etc.) I make a digitally authored but printed book - like a coffee table book, that is printed on decent paper and being closed 99.9% of the time is not like to deteriorate in the light, it's also in a handy format people can flick through casually if they so choose. I am not so sure my images will be valued by generations to come, so longevity for me is perhaps not as critical as others.

I am not married to hard copies - I am fully convinced that if Niepce, Daguerre or the host of other pioneers who struggled with printing had access to digital tech, they would have used it quite happily, and I don't feel in bad company, or that I should be shamed when I heard this in an interview:
"I have never been able to enlarge a photograph... I am just interested in the shots." Henri Cartier-Bresson
I totally respect those like Manfred who produce beautiful prints, but I have been too much of a nomad until recently to go that way, My images change each day on the backgrounds of my computer screens and digital TVs, so I get to see them, enjoy the memories as part of my daily activities.
Heaven knows what the tech will be in the next few decades, so I shall just work with what I enjoy right now.

[Astro]

I too have come to this a bit late... been on the road and taking more photos

I regularly come back with relatively large numbers of images, much as Manfred described. I also often shoot bracketted groups which can up the numbers considerably.
I generally carry out a 'standard' process on all the images that get through the first 'quality'sift. I use an action to do this and it adds a couple of seconds to the initial assessment. I then tag all the images with a rating. Those with the top rating will then be given a more consdered review and processed further. I will then decide which I will print.

I reckon I produce about 50 over a year which I would generally regard as 'Portfolio' images, (I'm guessing at this a bit, but I am looking at the number of stoarage folders I have in my study at present!)
Apart from those I consider to be the creme de la creme , I do print a lot more and I would guess over a year it adds up to about 400+ .
My family are going to have interesing times sorting them all out sometime!

As regards my analog images, once I went to digital, I scanned much of my archive, simply because I could translate the digital image to a positive at the touch of a keystroke.

I still on occasion, once or twice a year, put a B&W film into my old Zenit from the 1960's and shoot a roll, (just to prove I still can), and then process it. I then scan the negatives and process them digitally.
I'm ashamed to say that I am much better at processing digitally converted images than I ever was in a darkroom.

[CP140]

Another late joiner to this thread...

I remember the "good old days" when a roll of film went in for processing and came back with strips of negatives and a bunch of prints... only one or two of which were worth keeping. To me a darkroom was a place to get up to no good.

Since I got back into photography (digital) I would estimate that I have printed about the same proportion as I kept way back when.

Having said that... I have taken to getting a coffee table photo book made when we go away on a special vacation. Something to sit with, a glass of something in hand and think back upon.

[Cantab]

... I have taken to getting a coffee table photo book made when we go away on a special vacation. Something to sit with, a glass of something in hand and think back upon.

Your comment has put an idea in my head. Who do you use for producing the coffee table books?

[CP140]

Your comment has put an idea in my head. Who do you use for producing the coffee table books?

London Drugs

[Tronhard]

I used Blurb to produce my books.

[DanK]

Your comment has put an idea in my head. Who do you use for producing the coffee table books?

I've used Adoramapix for several. The books have lie-flat bindings and are printed on real photo paper. However, they aren't cheap, and they no longer provide their own ICC profile.

I've just started on a Blurb book. They will sell you a sample pack of their papers and then will deduct that cost from your first order. IMHO, none of the papers are similar to those used AdoramaPix. Blurb looks like a magazine or bookstore book; AdoramaPix books look like someone assembled them from prints you could make yourself with a heavyweight photo paper. However, I think some of them are good enough for my purposes.

[Manfred M]

Your comment has put an idea in my head. Who do you use for producing the coffee table books?

I have not used this company myself, but I do know a well known, local photographer who uses this Canadian supplier that he recommends:

https://www.photobookcanada.com/

The company is Toronto based but the book is printed in Malaysia and mailed to Canada; turnaround time is around a week.