Loading your camera with film is almost a thing of the past. But, says Joanna Wane, the digital revolution is creating a gaping hole in our heritage.
Slipping into the past used to be a magical journey through the cobwebs and
mothballs in grandma's basement. Hidden among the battered suitcases, hatboxes,
painted china, furs and dress-up clothes would be the most prized treasure of
all: boxes of old photographs and family albums that reached back in time to
another world.
Even if the pictures of long-lost relatives and distant childhood were faded or torn, beautiful new prints could be taken from negatives often decades old and then framed, creating a literal hall of memories.
For the millennium generation, that's as quaint and old-fashioned as the concept of hatboxes (let alone furs). Instead, they'll revisit the past by flicking through digital images on computer - if any survive.
In the United States, the sale of digital still cameras has outstripped film, with New Zealand and Australia close behind. Worldwide sales of camera phones are expected to near 150 million in 2004, accounting for a quarter of all mobile phones and generating an additional 29 billion digital images this year.
But while the public and the professionals have embraced this magical technology that allows pictures to be viewed in an instant and transmitted around the globe, concern is being raised that our pictorial history is at risk.
Few of the images taken on digital cameras are ever printed out, which means many are permanently lost when the file is deleted or damaged. Even if prints are made, the cheaper commercial models currently used for family snapshots reproduce at significantly lower quality and have less depth than film, especially when enlarged.
Imagine, for example, the exhilarated couple who snap off some shots on their mobile phone to announce the arrival of their newborn baby to the world within minutes of his birth. Later, when they're looking for pictures to frame or save in an album, they'll be caught short if that low-resolution mobile-phone image is all they have.
At the professional level, the more critical problem is digital storage. The fear is that as technology evolves, any storage medium in use today will eventually become obsolete and the material it holds lost to future generations.
"It's a major issue now," says David Ryan, head of the digital preservation department at the National Archives and Family Records Centre in London. "While people are busily creating digital information using emails, digital cameras, home video and even sound recordings on MP3, few are thinking much beyond immediate use."
Neville Marriner, picture editor at the Sunday Star-Times, fears visual historians will look back on this as the "lost decade" where images were deleted or stored at below archival quality. Most pictures taken during the millennium celebrations were on digital cameras that have already been surpassed by new technology.
"The worry is that in 50 years' time, we won't have an effective record of family life," he says. "The pictures I took of my 22-year-old son when he was born are black and white prints that will still be of good quality in a family album when his great-great-grandchildren are around."
Notoriously early adopters of new technology, New Zealanders have embraced the digital revolution wholeheartedly. International photo agency Getty Images, which holds 70 million images, says 100% of its New Zealand clients now source images digitally.
Wayne Sheppard, owner of Fast Finish Photo in Auckland, has been in the photographic business for the past 24 years. Official processor for the Rally of New Zealand, he handled 500 rolls of film shot by local and international photographers at the event in 2001. Last year, that dropped to 300. This year, he processed just three.
He encourages customers to store their digital shots on CD or DVD and says people are often disappointed at the quality of prints that they're able to produce from low- to mid-range cameras.
"In the floods in Foxton, people grabbed their photo albums and their pets - not their laptops and hard drives," he says.
"If your PC goes down, all your pictures go down with it."
One day, those albums may even be valuable antiques. At a rare book auction at Webb's this month, a 19th-century photo album of Maori portraiture sold for $15,000.
"The worry is that in 50 years' time, we won't have an effective record
of family life." - Sunday Star Times picture editor Neville Marriner
Auckland Museum's archives hold a large collection of family albums and snapshots. Glass plates, negatives and transparencies are kept in cool stores and key collections (such as Robin Morrison's Sense of Place: The South Island of New Zealand from the Road) are gradually being scanned to create a digital database.
Gordon Maitland, curator pictorial collections, says this means images can be viewed and supplied electronically, without disturbing the original.
So far, 13,000 images have been stored on hard drive, with a back-up copy on CD. One of the bonuses of this technology is the ability to repair and restore damaged images, but Maitland shares concerns about the security of digital preservation.
"You get varying predictions of longevity," he says. "As technology changes, you're not going to be able to read these disks eventually because the machines will be obsolete. You can keep up with technology by copying, but the fact that's not always considered is that copying has its limits, with the risk of incorporating corruption into the files."
The Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington is busy constructing its own archive to handle new arrivals of "digitally born collections", including digital photographs and published cartoons. More than 35,000 of the library's 1.5 million photographs have also been digitally scanned, including the '30s work of Wellington photographer Albert Percy Godber.
Question marks over storage security is what Jim McGee, a US photographer and publisher of online Vivid Light Photography Magazine (www.vividlight.com), calls "digital's dirty little secret".
On a personal crusade to alert consumers, he recently highlighted the plight of a reader who lost four years' worth of images when his hard drive crashed and a new computer wouldn't read his back-up CDs.
It's not all bad news - a growing number of websites and service providers are now offering virtual gallery space to host digital archives - the online equivalent of renting a lock-up garage. Data-recovery software has been developed to retrieve lost images, and digital cameras are being produced with the capability to print directly from the camera.
As for quality, Fuji is selling a high-resolution 12 megapixel model for $1699, where the equivalent technology used to cost $4000, while a ground-breaking Sony camera claims to produce colour that's truer to human perception.
Auckland photographer Ian Batchelor, who specialises in food photography for books and advertising, has shot almost exclusively on digital since last November, and says the quality he's achieving is as good as film, if not better.
He believes the progression to digital is simply part of an ongoing evolution, and that film - like glass plates - will gradually slip into history.
"There are still retro students coming through who retain an artistic love of film, and I do, too," he says. "But most people starting off in photography now are looking at some form of digital capture."
One who's turning back the clock is portrait photographer Mark Smith. After discovering that all his family's colour photographs from the '70s had gone yellow or "completely dissolved" despite being kept in an album (proof that the digital picture revolution isn't the first time an "improvement" in technology has had its downside) he has begun shooting archival-quality fibre-based prints to form a collection he eventually plans to gift to the Auckland Public Library.
In a style of black-and-white studio portraiture that harks back to the '40s and '50s, he uses an old Linhoff camera on a tripod, with natural light and a cloth draped over his head.
"It's an old-fashioned process that slows everything right down," he says.
"When I look at these prints, they're so beautiful and resonate something to me that I don't get out of colour prints or digital.
"People take a picture of someone on a mobile phone and think they have a record. It's fantastic technology, but when society looks back, there'll be no photographs of us now because they're lost or gone.
"I want these images to be passed on by people through their families. What I'm trying to do is make the memory last a lot longer."