Digital BW, The Print

On Nov 24, 2004, at 2:41 PM, Francis Ford wrote:

>
> I agree that it is much easier to store negs than hard
> drives also.I have only been around the digital world
> for about 2 1/2 years.I tend to think some better
> solution will come around for digital files,but as I
> also said the advantages of digital make it worth the
> risk.I was a nay sayer till I realized the great power
> of photoshop.I think to many photographers think
> unless we jug up a huge 8x10 camera up a mountain its
> not photography,thats all dogma.I have used 8x10
> cameras for most of my career,but am happy to embrace
> the digital world.Francis

Not to denigrate at all, I think you hit on a big point here. Many 
folks were not raised in a digital environment, and it is scary and at 
very best only barely comfortable. Others - and certainly, this is on 
the rise - take the entire digital environment as a given, and it is 
their expectation. Shooting film for them - or printing every file as a 
"backup" - would be as anathema to them as asking you to chisel your 
photos in stone. In part, I guess I'm saying it's a generational thing 
- the comfort with the tools, and the comfort with your most valuable 
possessions being little magnetically charged particles on a spinning 
disk somewhere, is a major generational gap, and it's simply something 
that passes with time. Do what makes you comfortable, I think that's 
the bottom line - I would never be comfortable trying to maintain 
analog archives; and my skills are adapted to deal with huge volumes of 
data easily. Others find it much more natural to deal with binders of 
labelled slides or portfolios of prints.

Cheers!