Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1997/11/25

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Subject: digital news photos/concerns
From: Paul Schliesser <paulsc@eos.net>
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 97 20:00:03 -0400

Digital news photography is a subject I am really concerned about. Ted 
Grant and I discussed this on Compuserve about a year ago with some other 
members of the photo forum there. It's one thing if all you care about is 
one-time use of your photos in your newspaper. What happens later, 
though, if some of them turn out to have historical or artistic merit? 
Even the best current digital cameras (I'm talking about hand-holdable, 
non-studio cameras) produce files with resolution too poor do do large 
gallery prints, or to be printed full-page in a book. (Fine art-book 
printing on slick paper is often 175-200 lpi.) Many of the famous photos 
by  Leica-carrying photojournalists were originally taken for one-time 
use in a newspaper or magazine. At the time when they were taken, meeting 
the current deadline was all that was important, just as with news photos 
being taken today; I'm sure that little importance was given to their 
long-term artistic value.

I fully understand the advantages to going digital; however, as more and 
more papers and photographers go this route, I think the problem will 
eventually become serious.

The other issue is storage. With film, you drop your sleeved film and a 
contact sheet into your filing cabinet, and it stays there forever. Will 
you do the same with digital files, or will you dump them when your disks 
fill up? What happens later, when the photos turn out to have some 
significance that they don't, now? The example Ted and I talked about was 
the photo of JFK shaking hands with the very young Bill Clinton. Would 
this have been a digital file that would have been kept for 30 years, 
copying it from disk to disk as formats change, and considering that most 
magnetic media only last a few years unless they are refreshed? If you're 
a long-time working pro, what do you do with the hundreds of thousands of 
images, which make up your lifetime's work, which need to be backed up 
every few years. Do you bother, or do you just keep what you think is 
important? Which of us has not come back years later and discovered jems 
in our old slides, which we didn't pay attention to because it didn't fit 
with the project we were working on at the time?

Right now, film can still record much more information than digital, and 
can simply be re-scanned if newer technology comes along. I'm a serious 
digital weenie, but I don't think that we are there, yet. Digital does 
have advantages: you can make unlimited numbers of first-generation 
copies, can transmit photos electronically, and no nasty chemicals are 
involved. I'm not buying into digital cameras, though, until the quality 
gets better.

- - Paul