THE DANGERS OF DIGITAL
Do you remember when digital overtook film? When getting and copying photos become so much easier? Do you know what we lost from preferring digital files over printed photos?
Don't get me wrong there is a huge advantage to digital photography but there are many dangers that the average person may overlook.
- Digital files can be lost really easily. The only way to lose printed photos is from fire, flood or actual destruction. With files, there are so many ways that they are no longer viewable. You lose the USB/hard drive, you accidentally format or delete them, your computer/hard drive/phone is stolen, and then there is also fire, flood or destruction.
- They lose quality without telling you. Did you know that when you upload something to social media/website that it is automatically downsized and if this is the only copy you have it will never look good again? (you can't upsize an image)Plus all digital files can spontaneously corrupt, one little pixel goes haywire and the entire image is broken. A printed image is guaranteed to last a lifetime, 100yrs, some digital files don't survive a decade, 10yrs.
- You have to go out of your way to see them. You can't just look up on the wall, or sit with family reciting stories over an album or folio box. You have to start the device, log on, find the folder, wait for it to load and then zoom in to see anything because they are tiny on the screen. Your family will be looking at a bare wall instead of them hanging in pride of place.
- Technology changes will make them un-viewable. Remember floppy disks? CDs? Do you have images from only 10yrs ago that you can't access without going and finding the right equipment to view them? I do, there are hundreds of images on CDs in boxes that I never look at. I don't know what the next change will be but I know it will change and it will make older images harder to access, assuming that they haven't corrupted from age and are completely unusable.
- We have so many images that the really important ones get lost with the rest. I have thousands of photos on my phone, some really significant, some of where I left my car when I was in Auckland so I don't forget where I parked. Unless I separate and back up the important ones before I mass delete them to free up storage. Bye, bye their gone.
- They look different on every device. Some people may never notice the difference but sometimes just seeing an image on a different screen can make you look yellow, green, pink, too bright, or too dark and can turn an amazing-looking image into something horrible. A photographer can be blamed for this when it isn't the image but the device it's viewed on.
- As a photographer, we are a service-based business, which means that our largest cost and labour is producing the photo shoot and that printing is actually minimal compared (less than 5% difference). Some people think that because it's now possible to take thousands of photos and they are intangible (not real things) that they should be sold at a lesser value. When there is such a small difference in cost and labour, we (Sarahlee Studio) chose to give you both the print and the digital file. Convenience and longevity.
- Part of me misses the old days of film, when all it took to produce an image was a $1000 camera and $35 for film, develop and prints.
When the time it took to produce a shoot was only 6hrs
Now to take a photo you need a $5,000 camera (or $2000 phone), $3,500 computer, $250pa. image processing software subscription and either a cloud storage service or USBs at $450pa. And the time per session is closer to 12hrs.
So yes, digital is more convenient but please make multiple copies of your digital files so that when you lose one copy, you have others. Please print the important ones, they'll outlive the digital versions by 90yrs or more. And always upgrade your storage devices and back up your hard drives, digital is dangerous.
