ARCHIVING LESSON – FILM vs. DIGITAL

FILM vs. DIGITAL

Hello,  I started further down this journey of collecting my works to display here at adamvollick.com tonight.

Unfortunately for me, I’m not the best archivist.  I’ve had a love hate relationship with the digital movement in the photography medium forever, mostly for archival and dynamic range reasons.

I was harshly reminded of those reasons, recently I lost a hard disk drive, not physically misplaced, but the contents vaporized.  I don’t really know what I lost, well I do and I don’t.  Here’s why.

1. The really important stuff was shot on film.  Film is tangible, a real substance that actually captured light and did it’s job very very well.  I know where it is, cut neatly into strips placed in archival envelopes, in a box in an ever growing collection of rubbermaid containers Ive been carting around endlessly for years.

2. Some other developmental work, and even some scans of my favorite film were on the lost drive.  It’s an invisible volume of thought, a complicated labyrinth of my process, scewed from memory by years.  Then hurricane electron comes though and generations of work was wiped out as though it never existed.  An old friend kept some things of mine that I know were stored on the drive I lost, but was horribly disorganized when I got it back.

So I sit here now, blessing the lessons learned… as I retouch some old film scans, and pull more unexpected surprises from negatives I had disregarded in the single-mindedness of my youth.

Moral of the story Rule #1:  Shoot film whenever possible.  Rule #2: Backup organized files.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 9th, 2010 at 4:30 am. It is filed under INSPIRATION ETC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.