Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2006/01/12
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]The difference in now versus then is that the prints produced tend to be topical to individual printing. We all know the drill, pictures of friends at the resaurant, the tropical beach, an embarassing wedding informal. In the past, there was a drawer of negatives that had all the random cultural elements that will intrique future family members if not researchers in Louisiana. Two examples, there is a picture of my mothers family out on a sidewalk. When looking at it you can tell who is there and who is not. It ended up being a outtake end of roll exposure outside the church after my great-grandmothers funeral in 1948. So I and the next generation can take a peek into the family in extremely personal moment as they interact after saying goodbye to the matriarch. As an aside, it is a very defining image in terms of what members of the Southern upper class wore, drove, went to church in, and how they chose to appear in a typical public moment. The second example is a roll of 6X9 negatives that my grandmother had kept from her mothers family. They were images from just before to just after the 1927 flood on the Mississippi. The just before images show boats on the river at the very top of the levee, possibly fifty feet above flood stage at that location. The following images are of ten feet of water as far as the eye can see lapping at the porch of the plantation house. (When that house was built they respected the river and built anything of real importance way above ground) Today, those images will be at best on a hard drive in some landfill. Like Sonny, I am shooting film and labeling negatives. When I move to the dM I will have to print far more than I do now. For a while I shot graffitti, most of the structures much less the graffitti are long gone. Thank heavens it is stored and labelled so if anyone is interested in late twentieth century grafitti in the southern U.S. it will be there. No, I don't take my photography so seriously that anyone will care about any artistry; but we learn a lot about a culture from pottery shards and what is in the trash piles. :) Don don.dory@gmail..com On 1/12/06, B. D. Colen <bdcolen@comcast.net> wrote: > > I'm not so sure you're right, Doug - Little 4x6 printers appear to be > flying > off store shelves - for $100 anyone can own a machine that for about $.29 > per print churns out prints that are the equal to those that most minilabs > produced. And that would suggest that there will be shoeboxes full of > prints. Granted, there won't be negatives. But the reality is that the > vast > majority of people never took care of their negatives anyway. I don't know > that the future will be that different than the past. > > > On 1/12/06 11:33 AM, "dnygr" <dnygr@cshore.com> wrote: > > > All camera makers must be affected by the switch to digital. I wonder > how > > large format has been affected. > > > > As I've noted before, we are the last generation to have photos and > negatives > > of our relatives in a shoebox. > > > > Future generations will have photos on discs that no one can access and > if > > they can few will go to the effort to figure out how. > > > > Doug > > > > > > > > > > > > > > ________________________________________________________________ > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Leica Users Group. > > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information > > > > _______________________________________________ > Leica Users Group. > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information >