Analog versus Digital

This week we look at Analog versus digital imaging.  Each has advantages and disadvantages, but rather then simply list them, we should take a look at how they work in the real world. 

Analog imaging is a chemical process, a silver salt, is a combination of silver and one of the halides, bromine, chlorine, iodine and fluorine.  Is exposed to light, producing a latent image, this is then amplified with another chemical to develop a visible image that is then processed with either sodium thiosulfate or ammonium thiosulfate which washes away the undeveloped salts.  This produces a negative, and by exposing this on another form of the same material, we can produce a positive.  If properly processed the images can be quite well preserved, for hundreds of years.  Although the chemicals have scary names, they really are not that dangerous, and some like the developer hydroquinone are used in medicine.  Interestingly enough, the most dangerous of the chemicals is actually silver, and modern labs will use recovery mechanisms to recover and recycle the leftover silver.  Yes the silver has value, but you need to process a lot of film, to get even a small amount.

One of the problems with the process, is that if you have a unrecoverable issue, such as an out of focus exposure, you can't erase it and do over, you need to use more film, and either throw it away, or leave it in the archive.  This has nothing on the printing process, where a good day in the darkroom, results in a few good prints, and a bin full of wet rejects.

Some of us, moved to a hybrid process, where you would shoot film, scan the film into a computer, and then do your editing on the computer, some even took and sent their printing to a wet lab. This can be difficult however, in that it can take a lot to get a good scan, and you can spend more time scanning then you do processing and printing in a darkroom.  This weeks image is such, taken in 2003 with a Konica FC-1 on Fujicolor ASA 400 film, it's a pretty good rendition of a wonderful image.   Some of us are now looking at using a digital camera to copy some of the older stuff, you need a macro lens though to get a 1:1 image, and that can be more tricky then anything else.  This is because I have  books of them, in my case going back 40 years, although much of the stuff from back then, I look at now, and think of it as crap.  Which is why as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I will probably never look at.

Then there is a fully digital process, digital cameras have pretty much eliminated all of the problems except one, there is no real way to archive images, the way the old B&W negatives could be put in a box and left for a century or more.  We will find that we need to copy images over to new media as old media types are replaced with new.  Just like 8" floppies were replaced with 5 1/4" which were replaced with 3.5", we will eventually see a day, where CD's and DVD's will disappear as usable medium, and billions of photographs will  disappear with them.  Digital formats will change over time, the JPEG files will be replaced with something else.  This becomes the question, if your great grandson finds a CD full of your Jpeg files, will he know how to retrieve them? 

On that thought, enough for this week

W