This is a wonderful 3 minutes of story:

http://vimeo.com/49425975

And it's haunting, eloquent...

This is a good one. Thanks Dave.

Not as dramatic nor as romantic, but I have seen something similar twice and it is an issue for business. Once after the 2008 meltdown when all but one of the employees at a project were terminated (no investment dollars = no employment). The last employees out the door erased the backup and fried the main computer. After things got back on track, I was hired for a year to go back and re-start. There was the paper data and a simple external hard drive I had bought in 2006 for a field backup. The other was on a property which had been shut down for 15 years or so. There were tons and tons of data, but on things like the old floppy discs and software from the 80s. It almost was the same thing as having nothing.

you do realize that the narrator who has been extolling this as the most wonderful meeting of the most wonderful lady in his life is left at the end with only a polaroid of himself take by that woman. He looks at nothing but his face and not of his lost love.

It's much more of a social comment than the exhortation -- backup, backup, backup...

In today's world, it's all about instant gratification, likes, comments, reshares. No one prints their pictures anymore, it seems.

Back in the day, they said that Polaroid would be the death of regular film and processing, printing. It didn't happen. It took digital to do that.

The days after Halloween, Thanksgiving, and especially Christmas used to be an absolute nightmare in the lab. It wasn't unusual to go in at 1 and not get out until midnight. Used to be, a day with less than 50 rolls processed was a bad day.

Now, the day after Christmas is just another day. In fact, we don't even open anymore. Everyone is busy taking things back. What used to be the biggest printing day of the year is now nothing.

On rare occasion, someone will bring in a bad media card, or a damaged drive, and ask if I can recover the images. "Well that's the only copy," they usually whine. I guess it takes a disaster for them to learn the simple lesson of backups, multiple copies on different media. And no one seems to know what a Carrington Event is. I wonder if people even realize these days that there is a sun up there in the sky? Probably not. I've even had one of the few remaining customers come in lugging a desktop with them, that won't boot up, and ask if we can get the pictures off of it.

I have to wonder, do they take their car to Pizza Hut for an oil change?

Granted, I don't print every image I shoot. A batch of mushroom photos for the mycology group is just that - meant to go online. But the kid's birthday? That gets printed.

Sadly enough, photography could continue if all electronics were destroyed. But most of the machines that could do it are gone now. Our film developer, which had a manual crank and could be heated (if nothing else, by candles placed under the tanks due to my jury-rigging, thank you) now lies in a landfill somewhere. Then again, one must have film first to do so, and film is now a niche market.

No one seems to realize how many jobs have been lost in the demise of the photo industry. We're just another victim of the instant gratification and technological "do it yourself" wave.

That's why I stuck in the very first phrase, Dave.

You raise a good point, Paolo. Have you ever seen any kind of an estimate of how many jobs lost. We keep seeing those changes. I think Google now has a system where companies can buy advertising digitally. Skip the whole Mad Men thing. Probably much more efficient, but somehow less interesting. And so on and so on. One does have to wonder what the world will look like in a decade or three. The one change I am looking forward to is outsourced upper management. There have to be algorithms that cannot be any worse.

What gripes me about the concept of digital memories is the fact that folks take "lasting" photographs, shots that happen only once in a lifetime and can never happen again, with a $40 camera they got on the rack at the gas station near the cashier. More than once I've been given photos for a website and asked to improve them so they look good, but the truth is, if you take a picture that looks like poop it will always look like poop.

In the days of real film even with the cheap cameras you stood a reasonable chance of taking a photo that didn't look bad and you could take to the local photo shop and have it blown up or shrunk or framed or what have you. That is because the film met a certain standard. You could purchase a favorite film and put it into any operation camera and be pretty much assured of the quality of the shot.

Now with the digital age we can get that 40 dollar camera which of course is reasonably priced, and take all the photos we want with it (until the camera breaks) and it won't cost us any more than maybe the cost of a cord or two. So we buy this camera and us it completly ignoring any of the faults of the photograph under the pretenses that "It is just a picture of my grandson, no one will notice that it is blurry". Then unfortunatly your grandson has a terrible accident and passes on, but you have this photograph to remember him by. Wait, this picture looks like poop! It is all fuzzy! Oh no! What will I do? Well, what you should have done is gone out and purchased a $600 camera or gotten a regular camera with film and you would have had that shot that would have looked good and lasted for a long time. Well, that is until the EMS storm burns all the digital memories off the face of the earth, but you did take a copy of your grandson taken on that $600 down to the photoshop and had it put nicely onto a 8x10 and framed didn't you?

Bring back the instamatic!

Dave (imported) wrote: Fri Nov 22, 2013 7:15 am you do realize that the narrator who has been extolling this as the most wonderful meeting of the most wonderful lady in his life is left at the end with only a polaroid of himself take by that woman. He looks at nothing but his face and not of his lost love.

It's much more of a social comment than the exhortation -- backup, backup, backup...

There are alot more smaller details (like he looks more in his smart-phone, than on her), it is the nuances here that matter.

I am replying to everyone, who said about backups and analog vs digital media.

The problem with both digital and analog media - they do not store well. Digital media, even with backups tends to accumulate bit errors (and formats become obsolete), but at least it can be copied verbatim, and stored properly (do it on metal punched tape, and it can be stored for thousands of years... but the weight...).

Analog ones age, and, depending on process used, they age badly. (Polaroid photos fade. And rather quickly for photo materials).

Even with backups, digital data requires work. So what if I have backup on QIC-80 tapes, where do I get the drive to read them? Aligned and in working condition... Same goes for CDs and DVDs and they too have limited shelf life.

Oh, and on the camera quality topic. I have compared digital camera (proper, though older 5MP model, died due to a sensor defect) with 5MP smart-phone camera. Results were bad for smartphone, it blurs small details (probably both excessive compression and bad lens). And I have compared it with another phone camera - same megapixels, but... it is almost blind in the twilight, and it is really noisy, even when it is not blurry. So, you really get what you pay for.

I do not miss the film cameras (autofocus, semiautomatic mode, and ability to quickly check the results are a big plus).

PS. Do powered off hard drives survive EMP?

fhunter wrote: Fri Nov 22, 2013 12:33 pm There are alot more smaller details (like he looks more in his smart-phone, than on her), it is the nuances here that matter.

YES! YES!

He's so enamored of his digital world that she sees herself as second in line to his digital presence.

Jeepers is that an ego crusher!

Best method to keep digital pictures.

Make a copy to a second drive,

Make a copy for your second PC,

Make a copy for your laptop,

Make a copy for your tablet,

Make a copy on a CD,

Put a copy in your cloud,



And when all else fails, Make a hard copy of it.