Did it get better?
You get better with age and experience. Unfortunately, at the beginning you know squat. And the early mistakes will always follow and haunt you. My database was on index cards transferred to an Excel spreadsheet.
It is parsimonious for key words and information. You will not find slide cabinet as a key word to look up.
Equally, my slides are stored in drawers. The rolls are consecutively filed. One set of drawers resides in a closet stacked one upon another impossible to comb thru easily.
Digitized with a dedicated (out of manufacture) slide scanner, the images reside on multiple redundant hard drives. Good? Eh? No, the slides were scanned in batches on different dates and reside in multiple places. Try to find and follow consecutively, only I know how to look. Oh bother!?
But everything is preserved – except my earliest black and white negatives. They live in my brother’s house somewhere.
Meanwhile I know where my stuff is. No one else does. And it can be pretty near impossible for me to find things too.
Nothing is lost
Pfewf!
How chaotic is your file system? Your storage system? Slides? Digital is easy. Negatives reside somewhere lost in my past. There were a lot of boxes of black and white negatives stored away somewhere.
When I started shooting slides, I began to develop my own not too long after. That was hell. Try to hold a water bath within a tenth of a degree for 30 minutes while the developing tank requires constant agitation. I bought cardboard mounts, ten thousand at a time. Heat sealed, I used our iron more than my wife.
Storage. At first it was fine. I stored box upon box in the top shelf of our bedroom closet….until space ran out. Then it was a closet – floor. Finally we build a custom cabinet. That was $$$. Hey! I was a neurosurgeon with a $$ budget. But even those drawers were eventually full. How many slides? Near to 110 thousand. Who’d think that would take so much space! I was cheap now. That last cabinet was simply too many $$.
So, I planned and built one. I had no experience building drawers. I borrowed a table saw. The kids pitched in. We built 26 drawers and a cabinet out on the deck in the NYC weather come what may.
To illustrate – I went on a search for the pictures of the project. To be sure I had not that long ago seen the pic of Jules on the deck helping. Aha! Find it?! Sure?! My organization is only as good as the information storage. I had scanned the picture/slide? Or… aha! Dammit. And this is funny. I took pictures of the new slide storage system with a digital camera. Oh! Rich! Digital to document film. We did this project in the summer of 2003. By the next summer I would be switched over 100% to digital with my purchase of the Nikon D70. Little did I know what was to come.
Meanwhile chaos again, as if you might care for my plight. The initial set of drawers was a built in. There have been a couple moves since then. 28 or so drawers sit in a closet again. Ha ha! And the cabinet I built sits in my office. 26 drawers built to last a lifetime storage of slides. It is half full of what was anticipated, the other drawers empty. Who knew the future and what would come of my slides? But, disorganized is the operative word. Operative? Ha! I still have dreams about doing surgery.
Don’t Laugh
I’m not neat. That is to say that things accumulate to critical mass and then a wave of energy overtakes me. I clean up. We took days to take stock of everything large and small tucked away in the depths of the kitchen cabinets. It’s amazing how you forget to look behind things. Efficiency? We tossed away lots. The rest was repacked carefully. Oh my….might as well toss that lot too. We won’t look behind and won’t find it till the next “clean up.”Likely it will be the next decade till we get ‘round to cleanin’ up again. Oh my!? …only two years. Ha!
Caveat!
Available light has a soft appearance different than the look of a strobe. The majority of professional style images are all done with strobe lighting. Smartphone photos by far are the most dominant images posted to Flickr. This was a throwback day.
Sometimes things go to hell. I have had all sorts of problems underwater. The first worry is that salt water will leak into and damage your gear. Yup! Been there done that. Fried two cameras and counting… one strobe…. Fortunately, the strobe main body is waterproofed. So, the batteries fried not the $400 strobe. Dive computer – o ring failure – check, yes. Forgot my memory card on one dive… yes, stupid!
Things breakdown. It will happen. Be prepared. Have a backup plan. My buddy forgot to charge his batteries. I had spares to loan him.
The latest calamity? The wire that connects my strobe to the camera sheared. It’s a fiber optic system that simply broke apart. At the beginning of the dive…it’s always right when you are in the water and at the beginning of the dive. I even have a back-up camera – (did not have it that day).
So? There has been only one dive I recall when I did not have a camera. Otherwise, you improvise. I love it when my advice rhymes. I went available natural light. I haven’t done this in ages. You have to white balance every ten feet deeper you go. And there are a bunch of settings to adjust. I did it on the fly and it only took a minute to recall all that I needed to do. Saved! Well, it was enough for me to come away with images. You know? Make lemonade when they give you lemons. I tested and experimented. It’s a learning experience when things breakdown. Yes! I could take a sharp highly magnified image. The main difference is that your odds are better when everything is working. But you can still get something. So it was not a wasted dive. I learned something today.
So? What caveat? It’s about backup storage. It’s enough to strike fear. Do you worry about losing all your images on your phone? Have you heard of the cloud? Do you remember floppy disks? Or VHS tape. Did you ever see a Betamax player. 8 track tape?
The New York Times published a very earnest article by a so called expert who advised – use Google cloud. It’s advice. And therein lies the caveat. All that other technology became obsolete and discarded. Floppy disks are coasters. There are no readers, so they are toast. Companies come and go. Kodak! Did you ever think that the great “Yellow father” would be an historical footnote? Ever hear of a platinum print?
Pardon me Mr NYT. Fine and dandy, but at least let me have redundant back up on an external drive that I own and control. Google forever?! Do/did you Yahoo? I zen too, but I want my photos to be preserved. Zen will live on; will my photos? They say my blog will be on the net forever. I’ve got my posts on word and the images on my hard drive. Paradoxically, anything you wish would go away will follow you forever too. Like old girl friends…did I say that?
photobackstory 