Warbird Information Exchange

Had a long chat with an Ex Navy cameraman recently. He is shooting digitally these days, but remembers the good ol days of the 20lb monster cameras he used to carry! OK, not quite twenty for the camera, but with the camera and a whole big satchel of film cartridges.......or the one he flew with that had a 1000 foot roll of film in it! Good old days! Kodachrome really did capture a look and feel that is hard to get with digital, not impossible, just harder.

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Aviation Illustration Website
http://shepartstudio.com/illustration/

Analog vs digital photography is a real problem imho. Just imagine in 500 years when someone tries to figure out what the heck a jpeg file is. At least with film you can view it optically. Digital formats are all proprietary and tied to electronics. Not like you can just pull out a microfilm reader or a light table and a loop to view them. We're trading away historical documentation for convenience. The same problem with the internet. All the documented knowlege in the internet is only there as long as people are paying for thier website. As soon as that is gone, all that work and history is too. Film and books beat abstracted electronic formats in the context of historical preservation. The internet is a ghost of information, not a true hardcopy. It's a shame most people don't do hardcopy versions of their internet works for publication. For example, everything written in this forum will no longer exist in a few years down the road.

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F-84F Simulator Project
www.f-84f.org

BHawthorne has just hit it on the head-
The U.S. DoD has miles and miles of military records from the Viet Nam era dealing with soldiers in service activities that they cannot access or read, because no one has the equipment to 'read' and present the info because time and technology has passed the equipment needed by and it all got scrapped because 'it's sooooo old'.
While the digital formating is quicker, the end result usually comes out 'flat' and has no depth unless the person processing the images has a really expensive photoshopping program It's hard to hold an SD card up to the light and see anything worthwhile.............

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Don't make me go get my flying monkeys-

Electronic documents definitely have a place in the world, it's just that they need hardcopy developed right along side the electronic versions. Each have strengths and weaknesses. We won't be experiencing those weaknesses in the immediate term, but history from 1990 on is going to be a mess in the distant future to find documentation of. The internet is the best thing to happen for immediate answers and the worst thing to happen for long term documentation.

Another issue, with digital photography being based on a raster bitmap based graphic format, good luck ever optically enlarging any photos for details. Those digital photos will never have any more detail in them than the fix amount of pixels captured at time of photograph.

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F-84F Simulator Project
www.f-84f.org

Just because it was shot on film does NOT mean it is necessarily better than Digital. After scanning some of my old pics from the '70s, I really realized just how BAD they were, Then again, it was a point and shoot. I would dare say that today's digi point and shoot takes a better image than the 70s point and shoot. Long term storage and historic preservation are still problems, but archiving negs and transparencies long term has it's own problems. An old medium format camera will definitely give a top of the line DSLR a run for the money.

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Aviation Illustration Website
http://shepartstudio.com/illustration/

Heh. Taking an archaeologist's view, unless it's carved on stone or baked into clay tablets, it's all pretty transient.

Many lesser transparency and negative materials degenerate within a twenty year period or so. That's one reason we are talking about particular, stable Kodak propriety processes.

There is a good argument we've been through a new dark age with the quick obsolescence of computer media formats - big and little elements (I can't read a 3.5in disc on anything here), a problem some organisations have found when upgrading to new systems but losing old backup / data formats.

As to the transience of the internet, it's an issue, but not as much as some think. There are archiving programmes running - in Australia there is the Pandora project: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/about.html and stuff like the Wayback machine.

However I do think it's just missing the point to focus on the medum specifically. As Holedigger's said, the quality of the equipment (lenses particularly) counts then and now for a lot, while the final arbiter is the person making the image. Whether talking photography or art, ancient or modern, it's the person who makes the pic, their 'vision' that makes the difference between great and good. Tools help, but great photographers have made great images with poor gear; poor photographers will still be forgotten even if they have the best equipment. (Have a look at Frank Hurley's work with his vest-pocket camera in the Antarctic in 1914 after he lost his large format one.)

Interesting discussion!

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James K

"Switch on the underwater landing lights"
Emilio Largo, Thunderball.

www.VintageAeroWriter.com

precicely! I've contended for years, and everyone has seen the proof, that you can give someone $25K in state of the art camera gear and get back crappy overexposed kids birthday party snaps and a real craftsman can take museum quality, well balanced stuff using a $3 throwaway from the corner drugstore. This has been a good discussion! Thanks for starting the thread WHEELSUP

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Don't make me go get my flying monkeys-