Digital files – all the rage!

As a photographer, I belong to many online communities where we discuss trends, ideas, techniques etc… and one topic that has been hashed out ad nauseam is the “digital files” discussion. It seems to be the way of the future. And many say that if we as professional photographers wish to stay in business (and I assure you, we do) that we MUST sell digital files. But I have to say that I have never felt peace with this thought. For some reason, it felt “less than” professional, for lack of a better way to describe it… UNTIL I came across this photo on Flickr, which made it all perfectly clear to me.

http://flickr.com/photos/humayunnapeerzaada/3115152755/

This image shows media storage devices from the past thirty years. The majority of them are now obsolete and the information they hold, is inaccessible. But now, look at these photos from (my best guess based on their clothes) the early 1900s…

bless my long suffering cat - she really is sweet!

No issue whatsoever in viewing these. My point is that a photograph will NEVER become obsolete. Yes, they age and do in fact change over time, but I will never have difficulty viewing the image.

“What about keeping digital negatives in case the print gets damaged?” you ask. Well, I’m all about negatives… in fact this box contains the film negatives from the first 5 years of my marriage. These are all just family photos.

the box is larger than an average shoe box

Who wants to guess how many times I’ve actually made a reprint from any of these negatives? If you said “NEVER”, give yourself 10 points! Not once, never ever ever have I made reprints from a negative. Yet I have boxes of them dating back to high school.

I guess my point is that technology changes so often that NOT having prints and utilizing only a digital media, is dangerous in my humble opinion. But I do understand the wish to share images electronically to family and friends, via your iPhone, facebook, email and whatever new way they have yet to invent. So I gladly give you a web sized version of the images you buy, expressly to share. I like to share my family images on our family blog and want you to be able to do the same. What I don’t want is for your beautiful images to be stuck on a disc, in the bottom a box, in the back of a closet. They need to be in albums, in frames and hung on walls.