OVERWHELMED BY PHOTOGRAPHS
Today, with my apartment finally pretty much in order I began to wonder about the huge number of photographs that I have stored away. When younger I always was touched by photographs and when in college and later collected photography yearbooks and leafed through the photographs. But to be a photographer then you had to have expensive equipment and to process your black and white photographs you needed a darkroom with a lot of equipment. Dime store prints didn’t satisfy me. So I took few photographs.
It was only when I was 60 and discovered digital photography that this changed. It happened when I borrowed a small, digital, very low resolution college camera, that I realized how inexpensive it was per copy to photograph and how much control you had in processing a photograph with no darkroom needed. So I began to take photographs. I have been hooked ever since.
I didn’t go through the wrenching technological change that long time photographers had to go through to change from film to digital photography with all of the questions about whether digital measured up to film photography. Luckily I didn’t know what I was doing, I just fired away and had a great time.
But one of the things I learned was that only one out of 10 or maybe even 20 photographs turns out well, so the more photographs you take, even if you try hard on every shot, the more chance you have of success. So that is why what I am going to do with all the photographs I have is such a problem. I have so many.
I have hundreds of thousands of stored digital photographs stored in different ways as technology changed. At first the only way to store large numbers of photographs was on CD’s and then DVD’s. I have hundreds of both kinds. Then came portable hard drives, first 60 GB, then larger and larger up to 2 TB. I have about thirty of these. And finally when I shifted to mainly using an iPhone camera I’ve stored my photographs on the Apple Cloud. Any accident or degradation to any of these forms of storage and I will lose a large number of photographs.
There are two problems here as I see it. The first is one that every person or business who has shifted to digital storage has. It is how to preserve anything stored digitally. In the old days we had boxes of photographs and since photography was relatively expensive we didn’t have many photographs and kept many of them in family albums. But this was only since the mid 1800’s. Before that there were no photographs, nothing to store.
Like every change in technology the new disrupts the old and I am going through this huge disruption which will probably get worse.
The second major problem is how to sort these close to a half million photographs and to select what I want to keep and then how to give them to the people who might want to have them. Obviously the first step is to get them all onto one large portable drive and secondly to sort them using latest artificial intelligence.
But both of these are complicated and very time consuming. So that is the process that I am about to emback on, and I don’t look forward to it.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 