Church detail, Hart Square
I’m working on a project incorporating both vintage photographs and images scanned twenty five years ago. There is something wonderful about holding a photograph that is one hundred years old. The prints that are coming close to their centennial are still viable and yet the scanned images from twenty years ago aren’t useful for this project because the scanned files are sized at 500 x 800 pixels at 72 dpi.
I find it odd the much older print is still useful to me in this project. We are so proud of our modern technology, the failure of the more recent technology is kind of ironic. The scanned images were done in the early days of digital processing and suffered from (digitally) primitive processes. The quality of digital equipment twenty five years ago and the relative expense of digital storage combined to produce a product that is of not much use today. I photographed the old print with my camera and got a very sharp 14Mb RAW file to process. It's much better that a scan of the same subject.
I think the lesson in longevity is choosing the medium for long term storage. In the past, there were no choices. It was a film negative and a silver gelatin print. The argument for longevity consisted of how many fixing baths, toner and archival washing you had to go through to make sure your print survived for multiple centuries. Looking back at many of my archivally processed prints I wondered why I spent all that trouble to preserve some really poor photographs.
Today, backward compatibility is technical term that will allow your project saved in version 2.0 software to be opened in version 10.2 of the same software. As I've discovered with the scanned images backward compatibility doesn't necessarily mean utility for future use.
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