[Leica] Film Lab

Mon Jun 19 04:13:18 PDT 2017

I see your point Peter after looking up immutable but your hard disk back up is not a single entity in time and space but is one of many. So, for your shot to disappear digital it must not open in every hard disk you’ve saved it to and that’s not realistically going to happen. In this discussion people talk as if your file is backed up to one hard disk and one hard disk only. I remover when I’d back up my whole computer to a stack of 20 floppies. But next month it was a stack of 20 other floppies.
And people forget just how smart we are going to be in the year 2525 if we are still alive.

We can shoot a whole lot more now that its digital be we were already being shooting a whole lot before.
An amateur brings an extra roll a pro brings an extra pro pack. That’s 20 rolls in cellophane maybe 10. And when we have a pro pack we shoot a pro pack. When we have a roll, we shoot a roll.
The difference between an amateur and a pro in chemical basic photography in the past century was a normal person goes click and walks away and a pro shoots a roll. “film is cheap “was drilled into us and it had to be became it did cost real money and we’d do a pretty good job of passing that on to our silence who were paying use $20 a roll to shoot it.

I’m very excited about making serious images and if I felt like few do that going back to the darkroom is going to help in doing I’d do that. The idea is if I must try so hard just to get a picture that makes it a better picture. That means I’m a serious shooter.  I know better having done a whole lot of both.

-- 

Mark William Rabiner
Photographer

On 6/19/17, 1:36 AM, "LUG on behalf of Peter Dzwig" <lug-bounces+mark=rabinergroup.com at leica-users.org on behalf of pdzwig at summaventures.com> wrote:

    But Mark, digital isn't immutable either. Disk drives develop faults, 
    formats may change in the future or no longer be backwards compatible, etc.

    Both have their failings. You only get to create negs once and if you 
    screw it up...

    Analogue is about shooting differently because you have to consider each 
    shot carefully so as not to waste film; unlike last night when I took 
    six digital shots of a beer glass (with beer and not emptied between 
    shots!) to see if I could get something to work "in the right way".

    Personally speaking I find working with analogue a b=very interesting 
    exercise. Then off to some shop to get it souped and scanned or I scan 
    the negs. Thats where the two meet...

    Whether I shoot better one way or the other is not up to me to judge.

    Peter

    On 07/06/17 21:56, Mark Rabiner wrote:
    > I’ve seen this a lot on the internet and it’s not true or don’t agree with it… it’s not true. But it’s really out there being passed around big time and achieving some unfortunate credulity as that’s how information spreds now. The better virus wins. And you never know which Meme will fly and which will die.
    > And that’s this backing up to analog as if chemistry based stuff is more archival than digital. Or just thinking you are covered if you have a film or paper copy of something.
    > When we all first heard about this new digital thing coming out the basic idea behind the whole thing was the advantage of digital is its digital.
    > You make a copy of the thing and the it’s a clone not a copy. It’s the same only it exists in a different space.  For photography that’s revolutionary. Because in the past when make a copy of a negative or of a print and hold them side by side and they are no way identical. The “copy” of the thing in most cases is a sad joke.  So, you try to avoid copies. You cover yourself as you’re shooting. You go “click” a bunch of times not just once or twice. The best copy or backup is another origional.
    > More to the point is the reality that the minute your film is dry or your print is dry it starts decomposing; leaking gasses, fading, and staining, changing color. Film and prints exist in the organic carbon based world just like people and trees. Film is made from dead bunnies (the gelatin). Prints are made from that and cotton and wood. Just like people they are dying the minute they are born. Returning to the earth from whence they came…
    > So your film based print and the film itself is not the same image as every day goes by. Every day in every way your print is worser and worser. Film too. Not as much.
    > This is a main advantage not disadvantage of digital. It’s a plus check not a minus. You could claim to hate the “digital look” but go with it anyway because it lasts forever. Its digital.  Other than the small possibility of an isolated file getting corrupted when you go to your digital file to Photoshop it again to print it or put it up on the internet again a decade or so later you’re NOT dealing with a faded different version of the thing. In digital if you can get that single file open it’s the same file you dealt the first-time decades going by.  Not one 100000th of a percent different.
    > And if that file doesn’t open you grab another older backup hard disk and it will.
    > In the past decade, my digital body of work is on hard disks and right here near me. My chemical body of work is in a storage cubicle with fumes coming out of each and every print and neg and slide.  I’ve not seen it in a few days I hope to soon and I don’t pass out from the gasses as I open the door.
    > By the way if one print or roll of film is under fixed or under washed it gives off a lot more and nastier gases than the stuff which was properly fixed and washed sitting near it or in the same closet. So, the properly processed stuff is probably fading at an accelerated rate too.
    > The chemical analog workflow is messy. The advantages are hard to find. And if there are any advantages to film archivalness is not one of them.
    > 

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