Attached Link: Film (still) kicks ass

I have about 30,000 images I've shot since I started playing with digital, and that's in addition to two shelves of books full of medium format negatives. In terms of the total amount of data stored, the film blows the digital out of the water, of course.

My images live on 2 OpenBSD-based servers which offer up about 1.5terabytes each onto my home LAN. One of the servers is in a different building (my studio, a separate structure 500 feet from my house) connected via a wireless bridge network. The 2 servers rsync eachother to stay up to
date, so if something happens to one I'll not lose very many files - only a day's work, max.
Image permanence of digital concerns me greatly. Not just the "media permanence" but the "image value" permanence. Consider this: when I first started doing photography, "digital imaging" was ASCII art. Since the 1980's we've seen zillion-fold improvements in image resolution, whereas the human eye hasn't improved at all. Yet resolution keeps going up because manufacturers need to sell newer stuff and mord hard disks, etc. But if you look at the "ugrade path" of digital imaging, unless something changes rather dramatically, the images we're working so hard to capture today are going to be garbage tomorrow. A kid's eye-bug/cellchat/camera system in 2015 is going to be shooting 64megapixel 128-bit color images. What will be the value of today's laboriously captured 6megapixel images? None?
I wrote a short rant about this entitled "film (still) kicks as&" that might amuse you if you're concerned about this stuff. Note: I am not a "film nazi" - I love all photography. But I've spent too long around computers (I started in the late 1970's)not to understand that technology taketh away as often as it gives.
I made prints 5 years ago from some 1900's glass plates that a friend of my father found in storage. What will your CDs be like in 2110?

Message edited on: 07/17/2005 15:12