April Newsletter
Greetings from
Porter's Camera Store!

As digital photography has evolved, there have been many articles written in photo magazines and general interest publications about the advantages of digital over conventional photography. The ability to preview the picture and delete and reshoot immediately, e-mailing pictures to family and friends around the world, being able to crop, correct and print photos at home with a relatively inexpensive printer...all are solid benefits of digital photography. But there are a few other characteristics of digital photography that should be remembered.

When you shoot 35mm or other film, you end up with a tangible image that can be stored in some manner, retrieved and projected or printed at a later time. You've probably seen old family photos that are 40, 50 or more years old. They may have discolored or faded some with age, but can still be viewed and enjoyed. If you have negatives from this same era, a lab can still make prints, too.

Most digital photographers delete the image from the camera card after copying it to the computer hard drive. If the only copy of the image is on the hard drive, you are vulnerable if your hard drive fails and takes your images with it. For that reason, you should copy the images onto a backup drive or other media as a reserve. This is where things get a little more difficult, since digital photography is still in its infancy and no long-term media standards have become apparent. There may be no way to play back in a decade or two the disk or drive that you store the images on today, since all of the hardware using that method is obsolete. A recent Associated Press article said a scientist researching the 1976 NASA Viking landing on Mars was unable to read the magnetic tapes created at that time since the data was in an unknown format. Magnetic media is not suitable for archival storage, since the binder that holds the magnetic particles onto the support deteriorates with time. At the present time, burning your photos onto CDs is the best hope since they hold many images, are inexpensive so you can easily make multiple copies and are not subject to the problems inherent with magnetic media.

How should you preserve digital photos so they can be enjoyed by future generations? One, make prints of your favorite photos, file them in an album with captions describing the people, places or things in the photo. The pictures can be made on photo-quality inkjet paper or for even better archiving, onto conventional photo paper. Porter's Digiprint digital photo printing service available online at www.porters.com is an excellent way to make hard copies of digital photos for sharing and showing in an album. Once the image has been printed, if something happens to the digital file, at least you still have the print so the image is not completely lost. It can be scanned to recreate the digital image, but potentially at some loss of quality. Secondly, as soon as the next generation of storage is starting to make the system you have digital photos stored on obsolete, copy your files over to that new system. Since digital files don't suffer generational loss like analog files, your images won't lose quality with each copy step. By updating the files, you'll be assured the media hasn't deteriorated to the point the images won't open, and that the media is so old drives no longer exist to accept the media.