circle of technology

Two things that annoy me about digital:

1. The myth of "it saves money."

Not when the camera body is obsolete in two years or less. Not when the latest download software won't run on my otherwise perfectly good if old G4 Powerbook. The software wants more RAM than the aging laptop will take. As does the latest version of Photoshop (the older/smaller versions won't read RAW files from the newest cameras). Not when I'll soon need more storage to back up my hard drive which is rapidly filling with 12mp images... even the hard drive on my newer/bigger/faster desktop machine.

So if I go on a two week trip, like I will soon, and if I have three shoots booked, as I do, with more possible, I have a choice of buying a pile of CF cards at approx. $14/GB, or spending $1,000 or more on a new laptop that I don't otherwise really need yet, + something to back it up onto.

2. Permanence, or lack thereof.

I have very real concerns about longer term handling of my images. Digital media last what... five years? At a minimum, it's going to mean backing up all those images, and then backing them up again, and then again... more of them each time.

When I lost interest in photography for a while in my post-punk burnout (OK, 1983 to 1997 is more than a while), I returned to find all my old negatives in perfectly good condition, carefully labeled in envelopes. I sell as many of those old punk images as everything else combined, so that's a good thing.

Let's say, hypothetically, that for some reason I get bored with photography and walk away for several years. Will I come back to find the digital equivalent of useless dust?

The minimalist punk rocker in me is beginning to get pissed. Maybe I need to work through this digital phase. Maybe all that time spent processing film at the kitchen sink isn't so bad after all. I'm trying to simplify things, not make them more complicated.