I wrote in a previous entry, A Digital Convert, all about discovering the benefits of digital photography that finally converted me from being a film user. I have now been digital for almost a year and while I’m still enjoying the benefits of digital, I’ve had time to discover the downside of it as well.
First, on a somewhat light note, since switching to digital photography my pictures are accumulating at an alarming rate while waiting to be scrapped! There are two factors in this amassing of photos. Since photos are free to take with my digital camera, I don’t have to weigh if a photo is worth the financial cost of film and processing before grabbing my camera and shooting away freely. And instant review of my photos means that I get usable photos from a higher percentage of shooting situations because I know immediately if a photo didn’t come out and can re-shoot it. In consequence, my “good” photos that I want to eventually scrap are accumulating even more rapidly than in my film days!
But on a darker note, I’ve learned (thankfully, through observation and not first-hand experience) that digital files are much more prone to loss than photo negatives. Ask yourself these questions: How many people do you know that have lost all of their negatives due to a major disaster? How many people do you know that have lost all their digital files due to a computer disaster? The answers are probably none or a few, and quite a few. While negatives are nearly impossible to back-up and are easily destroyed in disasters like floods or fires that affect our homes, most people will fortunately never experience such an event. But on the contrary, digital storage media are notoriously unstable and it is exceedingly common for them to cease functioning with precious data forever lost inside them. And while, unlike film negatives, digital files are capable of being backed up, it takes extra steps beyond what is done to simply make the files usable. And that makes many of us procrastinate about doing it regularly or doing it at all – until the day that a computer catastrophe teaches us how important it is to back-up our data.
Photo files can be backed up in so many ways: to CDs, to another network computer, to a portable hard drive, to an online file hosting service, or to a combination of those methods for extra security. But it does take additional steps to do and we have to be diligent about doing it often. It is easy to put it off when you are busy (I’ve been guilty of that myself).
Don’t lose all of the benefits of digital photography – along with all of your precious family pictures – by taking shortcuts. If the worst happens, you’ll realize too late that the investment of effort would have been worth the return ten times over.
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