Digital BW, The Print

Newbie to the list

I reciently retired and decided to get back to photography to keep busy. I retired as a senior systems engineer who had worked in research since the 1970s, and also in high energy physics and telecom related areas. I expect to bring the same attention to detail and record keeping that I used in my day jobs. I purchased my first digital camera in 1995 and have owned several others since, my dad had Contaflex with Ziess optics and I purchased a Sony based on the lens. I used film up to 2005 for important shots and would shoot a few rolls of B&W a year for the grandchildren to show to their grandchildren. I used Nikons from the late 1960's to 2005 I have two F's and 2 Nikormats and a dozen lenses.

I grew up in a home with a darkroom and was reading a light meter and shooting and developing and printing with help at 8 and on my own after school by age 9. My grandfather was a profesional photographer who did beach photography along the gulf coast and in St. Cloud FL where his father owned an orange orchard near the wintering grounds for the wild west show. I have photos he made with Annie Oakley. My dad did all his own photo work and I still have a darkroom and enlargers although the equipment is packed up. I receintly retired and have decided to get the equipment and software to do digital. I am very interested in the carbon on cotton process as my wife is a genealogist and I have been working on organizing and properly storing photographs for a few county historical societies. One project concerns hundreds of old school class photos usually 6 X 8 to 8 X 10 the objective is to scan and clean up and repair minor damage scratches and tears, and to print a new copy for their public access files. The few I have done I printed on archival scrapbooking paper with a smooth finish the paper I have been using states that they are for use with color ink jet printers. In order to get a better and more archival print after several months of reading and emailing I intend to use the Eboni 6 system with an Epson 1400 printer.

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In 2000 as part of the Milenimum project the Library of Congress was to migrate the thousands of video cartridge of news footage and that of military photographers of the Vietnam era to archival DVD's. The problem: the old large format tape cartridge players had not been made for many years and there were only two functional machines at the library. Archivests had to beg machines from the closets of TV Stations and visit video junk yards, in the end they were able to get around a dozen players working by scavanging parts from several dead machines to rebuild each working unit. A similar problem occured when moving the NASA moon landing videos only there they found that the original tape had been reused and they had to make do with copies.

As the demand for CD Discs wains, and a visit to any large computer store will show a few stacks of CD's and dozens of brands of DVD's and a few blue ray discs. As this trend continues new computers will install new drives that in order to reduce costs will come with software drivers that will not support CD's. Why spend money to write code for something that will not be used. Some very early computers also included a drive for storing data to small casette tape cartridges. I had two of these but I doubt I could find a functional drive and if I could there would be no drivers to read the information into any editing program. I already have programs that will not run under vista or W7 and Apple is no better with many unsupported OS for which drivers for new hardware are no longer being written and new comercial software versions where the financial incentive to write Mac drivers is not seen as cost effective.

A change in consumer computing purchasing is happening the traditional desk top is vanishing from many homes replaced by net books, pads and smart phones. None of these can directly read a CD and they are fast becoming the consumer "Computer" of choice. Cloud computing is moving to the home and the face of the home computer is rapidly changing. Use of the cloud removes a lot of control over your data and puts some one else in charge. This happens when you use internet data storage sites where you are putting a third party in control of your information. A Google search on "Cloud computing + data loss" yielded almost four million hits.

Bill Lewis