Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Dave, you yourself claim that high quality is not always the most important factor. (Why do you encode your mp3's in low quality? Because it's 'good enough' and you don't have infinite disk space.)

Likewise, even when the quality of digital surpasses the quality of analog there will be reasons to keep it wet. My reasons today do involve quality (for B&W analog still can't be beat), but I also enjoy the process more than the digital process. It's just more fun, and as digital surpasses film in quality, film will still be more fun for me.

In some ways, it's kind of like asking if taking pills will someday replace drinking wine. In some cases, people do just want a certain result, and the "pill" is the most effective way to get it.

But, the nuances of the "old fashioned" way can also be savored--much of the very-human delicacy of work-by-hand-with-physical-materials can be seen and can be worth being seen.

Will traditional photo processing only be used in "tiny specialty jobs"? That would be one way to say it, but it's kind of like comparing the ratio of hand printers to every digital printer (i.e., a fine art process to a utilitarian process).

(Of course, there are also digital artists who do fine art digital processes that are on par with traditional ones, just different.)

As it turns out, one of the largest "wet-labs" in Southern Ontario, Chas. Abel, just closed within the last month. The owner said that there were days when it didn't even pay to turn on the equipment. They had laid off all but four family members over the last year and helplessly watched their business evaporate.

For the average snapshot taker, there is no advantage to film these days - especially since good digital cameras can be had for the cost of a few rolls of film plus processing in the discount electronics stores. For the professional, there REALLY is no advantage - one pro told me that he had amortized his entire investment in two top-of-the-line Canon rigs within 3 months in savings in film and processing, and can afford to try more "creativity" in his shoots. His clients expect to receive the digital results of his shoots by the end of the same day.

Film is obsolesced, which, in McLuhan terms, means that it will re-emerge as an artistic form - perhaps playing with chemistry will allow some creative photo/chemist to discover a new aesthetic expression.

"Film is obsolesced..."

True, however it has not obsolesced as rapidly as the recording media where you will store your digital images.

I've been around the computer industry for nearly 40 years, so I have seen "electronic copies" on paper tape, magnetic cards, large removeable disks, Trash 80 8-inch disks, 5-1/4 floppies, 3-1/2 disks, CDs and DVDs (among many others).

I, for one, don't want to have to remember to convert all my photos to the latest format with each upgrade of my computer. Will your computer even have a .jpg viewer in it 20 years from now? The odds, based on past experience, is against it.

My mother died a couple months ago and while going through her stuff, we found all kinds of old photos. Even one of me on a pony taken with a Brownie at least 50 years ago. Fifty years from now will the people sorting your life treasurers be able to view them?

I love my digital camera. I bought a Canon Digital Rebel when they first came out, and I've been having a blast with it. I've taken more photos in the past six months than in the previous six years.

And yet, I still believe there's a place for wet labs. In the age of the digital camera, it's still possible, even desirable, to print photos using a hybrid traditional process. Okay, my photos are shot in pixels, but when I have them printed for display, they're printed on photographic paper and run through the wet lab process, rather than just spitting them out of the ink jet printer. I prefer the look of wet lab prints, and I believe they are more permanent than ink jet prints. And when my wife and I got married last year, we hired a photographer who shot on film rather than one who shoots digitally. There is a sense of permanence to film that I don't feel with digital.

Going forward, I'll probably be shooting 99+% digital, but there will always be a place in my camera bag for film, and particularly for traditional printing.

I should add to my case above (to temper its fundamentalism): what you ask is a good question.

I create almost all of my music digitally at this point. My intimate (Anastasia Fuller, photos and blog at - http://anastasiafuller.com/blog ) does mostly traditional photography and darkroom processing, but does digital for certain things.

And, we talk about this a lot--why we are using digital or analog for something particular, what it would be like if we did it the other way, the economics of such choices, people who have gone 100% one way or the other, people who do hybrid works, etc.

When we made the quantum leap into digital products, we lost not only a certain innocence, but also an ability to fundamentally understand how it all worked. Back when we had our audio on vinyl, I could take a playing card, shove it into the grooves of a record and get it to make sound (crappy sound, but sound nonetheless) -- and I could pretty much "get it" how the waggly things on the vinyl were nothing more than a frozen rendition of the waggly air that turns into sound in our ears. When I could set up a darkroom in the basement and process B&W photos, I could see a negative, watch the paper as it got run through the developer, experiment with silver-based compounds in high-school chemistry labs, and "get it" how the light traveled onto a frozen rendition of itself on a piece of film.

No more. I can read all I want about how sampling rates and D to A converters work, ad nauseum, and while I can follow the technology along (more or less), I'll never "get it" the way I could when it was still vinyl or Verichrome Pan. My kid won't be able to stick a playing card on a CD (or whatever is out there by the time she's old enough to care), nor will she be able to take a strip of negatives and hold it up to the light and wonder what the pictures are all about. In each case -- if she's unable to get to the right kind of computer, she'll be SOL.

Good? Of course -- we've got it cheaper more now than ever, I can Photoshop to my heart's content without need to resort to obscure light-blocking methods under an enlarger, and I won't have stained fingers from touching all those damned chemicals. I can operate a recording studio on my personal computer that would have made Paul McCartney cry with envy in 1964. (OK, I would still need $3000 Sennheiser headphones and a few kick-butt microphones, but you understand what I mean.) And, it's still a heck of lot harder to scratch digital media than those oh-so-soft vinyl records and plastic-based film negatives. In all, for most of us, most of the time, the switch to digital is the only rational choice.

But, what are we missing now? When we don't have an intimate connection to how things work, we end up dependent on the few people who can understand it. We're forced to work through their tools, their Wizards and their user interfaces, each of which comes with a set of baggage reflecting the choices and paradigms that one designer had. I'll be forever dependent on upgrading equipment. And, I'll never be able to experience that bizzare odor and close atmosphere of a photolab. (If you've ever smelled those three chemicals sitting a few inches from your face, you know what I mean.)

Even if it's nice to be able to sit on the back porch with my laptop and wi-fi card uploading snapshots for all the rellies to look at, while listening to my personal MP3 collection on the same computer at the same time (note to RIAA -- they're copies of MY OWN CDs, so back the hounds off), those of us who've been there before the change will always miss something I'm sure.

Of course, my grandfather (may he RIP) could have come up with any number of reasons why it's just not the same since we left horses behind as our main form of transportation -- reasons I would have found unendingly quaint. Thus, I'm sure my kid will only find me to be loony.

Richard Feynman, in one of his books, talks about fixing radios as a boy, radios with tubes, variable condensers that looked like tiny modern sculpture, and pully arrangements that hauled the needle back and forth across the dial. He said that all these discrete pieces of hardware made it a great deal easier to understand the apparatus, and lamented that kids no longer have such learning aids.
Anyone who has nursed an older car has had a similar experience -- experimenting with the needle valves once the carburetor is reassembled, setting spark gaps by eye, adapting a junkyard transmission from a different model -- all of it had the effect of giving one a feel for the technology.
Chances are, our technology-savvy kids will someday have similar memories of finally getting Linux tamed, and the network to the point where it could mostly be taken for granted. Not like the the William Gibson-like invisible technology their kids will be familiar with.