The digitisation of photography
The death of Kodak
The death of Kodak
After 22 years of analogue photography (and 22,000 negatives) using an Olympus OM-10 and a subsequent succession of OM-2's, I made the transition to digital photography.
As the price of sensible-quality (at least 5.2MPixels of non-interpolated CCD) digital cameras with real (non fixed-focus) lenses descended in to the realistic (sub-$1,000) arena I began the (sometimes painful) transition to providing a workable, high-quality digital workflow.
Starting with an Epson Perfection SCSI flat-bed scanner to scan existing prints and MS Photo Editor to edit (ugh...) I upgraded to a Canon FS2700 negative scanner, Canon software and JASC Paint Shop Pro (a little better), then again to a Canon FS4000 4000-dpi negative/slide scanner, Hamrick Vuescan and PhotoShop 6.0 (acceptable quality but a steep learning curve...) and finally to a Canoscan 8800F and Photoshop Elements 2020.
I burnt the .TIFs to DVD and produced index prints, later I transferred the whole lot to a NAS device backed up to a second device in a remote location.
I printed to an Epson R1800 on Epson premium Glossy photo paper and used a Spyder 2 to colour balance the screen and printer using .icm profiles.
It changed the way I viewed my existing photographs: negatives that were previously unusable could be re-cropped, rotated, colour-adjusted, reduced to black and white, and otherwise manipulated in Photoshop.
Wires, posts, signs, errant fingers, drunken angles could now be corrected.
The digital darkroom is a wonderful place, but cannot pull detail from a badly under-exposed original; it's not a miracle cure.
It changed the way I took photographs - if a composition was perfect apart from an errant telegraph pole, pedestrian or overhead cable I could still take the shot, safe in the knowledge that I could remove the blemish later.
I continued with the OM2 but only had the films processed, I would generate the edited prints later.
In the summer of 2002 I experimented with a Kodak DX4900, one of the first good digital compact cameras but it was limiting and after three months the overly-complex and flimsy lens cover mechanism failed.
The first affordable true 5.2MP digital camera had just arrived in the form of the Sony DSC-F717 so I made the transition.
The Olympuses were retired (and sold well). 18 months later I upgraded to an 8MP Sony DSC-F828 and swapped to using the RAW file format for greater flexibility, then in 2006 to a Sony A-100 DSLR. Finally in 2014 I went medium-format in the form of a full-frame DSLR, the Canon EOS-6D. Eye-wateringly expensive, as were the lenses but oh, the quality.......
An archive project in 2011 following the death of Nessa's stepfather involved the digitisation of his 89,000-strong negative and slide collection for family use over a period of six months and slowly, over subsequent years I scanned my way through my own and my family's collections, accelerating following a house downsize in 2022 and the decision to destroy all photo albums and eventually negatives. This was finally completed in the summer of 2024.
In these days of iPhones in our pockets, full-frame DSLR's and Photoshop, cloud storage and auto-backup it's hard to remember how little control we had over our images. iPhones have truly democratised photography but maybe, just maybe, we have lost something along the way.
I suppose the big worry is that the huge quantities of photos we all take on our phones will disappear - iCloud must have simply eye-watering amounts of storage and at some point it's going to break, and trillions of peoples' family memories will go up in digital smoke. I'm old-fashioned enough to only keep recent photos on iCloud and regularly drain my account down to local storage, which keeps response times good and I sleep at night knowing everything is backed-up and, possibly more importantly, immune to malign interference.