HOLD ON TO YOUR MEMORIES

Photography is Australia’s most popular hobby. More than 70 per cent of Australian households have a digital camera and we buy over two million digital cameras a year. Australians also snap to it with another seven million cam phones.

The battle to prevent our images from fading and being lost for future generations has been going on for centuries. However in Australia, it reached a real crisis in 2003 and 2004 when the total number of photographs being printed dropped dramatically and nearly two hundred one hour photo print shops in Australia went out of business. What caused this sudden death of the family photo album? The answer is simple: it was the arrival of the digital camera. This caused annual Australian photographic film sales to drop from nearly 40 million to less than 4 million.

A History of Photography -a Few Seconds Exposure 

First off, what is photography? It's simple; it's Latin for drawing with light.  Amen.

Who really started it all? Who is to blame? Some say it was ancient caveman, but Italians will claim it was Leonardo Da Vinci. I go with the cavemen! One day, they discovered that after a hard day's hunting and gathering when they had rolled their protective rock back over the cave's entrance, a small chink in the rock could let a beam of light form a picture of what was happening outside to magically appear on the opposite cave wall. There in full living, breathing colour, they could watch perfectly formed, moving colour images of everything happening outside! Can you imagine the shock and fear of suddenly seeing this?  Think about it! Comparatively speaking, at the time it would have made high-def, set-top box 5 channel sound digital tv seem quite passé! There was only one small problem: the picture was upside down and back to front!  Even more magical! But, it was an image, and probably for our illustrious predecessors, just as entertaining as anything we see on the box today. However, as night fell, the image vanished. There was nothing to remember it by.

In 1490 enter the Italians. Leonardo invented his own cave, a comparatively small wooden box with a pin hole in the front and a ground glass screen at the back. It was portable and Leonardo could trace the image formed with pen and ink onto paper. Some said tracing was a form of art cheating! But he could keep his image and the camera obscura was borne.

But the burning issue was: how could the perfect image with all its detail be kept more accurately than by a tracing?    

This problem, I maintain, was solved in 1835 by an Englishman, named Henry Fox Talbot. He took the first black and white photograph using chemistry to develop a negative to a positive silver halide image. Others, particularly anyone French, might disagree with this assertion.  They would probably claim it was a couple of their local boys, Niépce and Daguerre that were right there, in on the action with a claim to inventing photography.  Believe it or not, back in those days, there was bitter Anglo-French rivalry. Fancy that!  Their initial trouble was they could make only one temporary image that kept fading. But it was Fox Talbot that eventually came to the rescue when he discovered a negative-to-positive process that allowed non-fade multiple prints to be made. Thus, if you will pardon moi, I maintain that it is Henry Fox Talbot that is the true founder of photography. So there!

The Family Album

Indeed, Henry Fox Talbot was not only the father of photography, but the pioneer of the family photo album: that magnificent and treasured family heirloom that details our personal histories with fascinating and telling graphic images of our forebears. They are all there in the family photo album. Everything was recorded for posterity: great- great granddad off to the Great War, then, just over a decade later, there's great granddad off to do his bit for King and Country. Turning the pages, complete with photo corners, we see: baby photos, graduations, engagements, marriages, holidays and baby photos. The endless cycle continues as we turn through the great book until we come to the year 2003. Suddenly, it stops. Just blank pages follow. There is nothing for the coming generations to see. What caused this disruption to the vital family record? The answer is simple: a new miracle of photography had arrived. The digital camera!

Ironically enough, more pictures than ever were being taken. They were just not being printed! And alas, many of the photos taken since 2003 have or will be lost forever.

How to Store Your Photos

You’ve seen the moment and clicked the shutter. You have immediately had the satisfaction of viewing the finished picture and know it’s come out. No waiting for all the pictures to come back from the lab. That’s what digital photography is all about. But what happens next? Do you transfer that photo to your computer and file it away in a special place on your hard drive, or do you burn it to CD. If you only do any of these, chances are that in 20 years those pictures will be lost forever.

The Computer Hard Drive

This is the worst and most dangerous place to store your digital photos! Don’t listen to those IT enthusiasts! Hard drives are notorious for failing. Plus the computer can be lost or stolen. Either way, flash bang wallop, there go all your memories!

Sure, keep a copy of your photos on your computer, just don’t rely on it! And don’t be too sure that when you come to update your computer, that you will be in a position to transfer them to the new one. Life does not always work like that.

Storing on CD & DVD

This is a great idea as a back-up form of storage. You can also leave some copies of the CDs in a friends or family member’s house in case of a fire at yours. But disks also fail. They scratch easily and Australia’s humidity can have a horrific effect on the CD’s coating. Also, they will, in our terms of measuring time, shortly become obsolete. Then what will you do with them? Don’t believe this? Then tell me the last time you saw a computer with a 5 ¼ inch floppy disk drive! One last thing, when using CDs or DVDs, only write on them with the special pens made for this purpose. Other felt tip pens have an acid in the ink that will corrode the oxide layer of the disc sooner rather than later.

On-Line Storage Now we’re really getting serious about looking after our photos. We pay a company to store all our images for us on a big main frame somewhere deep in the heart of Texas. Again, it’s good back-up and who has heard of a big main computer going down? It hardly ever happens. And that company is never going to go out of business is it? Being a kind soul, I will not tell you the story of American photographer Jacques Lowe who was so keen on his images of President Kennedy being preserved for posterity that in 2000 he had his images stored in JPMorgan Chase basement bank vault. Unfortunately the branch he chose was 5, World Trade Centre, New York!

Is There Any Safe form of Electronic Data Storage? Funnily enough, the safest electronic place to store your digital photos is the camera’s memory card you originally took them on. It’s known as flash memory, a name that in itself does little to inspire confidence in longevity! But it has no moving parts to damage and your pictures could be quite safe here for over 100 years. Initially this form of storage was very expensive but the price of memory cards has fallen so dramatically in recent months, that now they are as cheap as chips. However, if you go for this, make sure you use the memory card only once. Alternatively, you can download your images on to a USB flash memory stick. The only problem with either of these ideas is that 20 years later, you will have all these little wafer thin plastic cards lying around with no idea of what’s on them and, worse still, nothing to plug them into!

So How Do We Keep our Photos

The only sure way to be able to hold onto your memories is to print them. A photo is just not a real photo until it is printed. Fortunately, making proper photographic prints of your digital photos has become very inexpensive. New forms of printing digital photos also allow us to print up our photographs on everything from magnificent photo books to T-shirts, coffee mugs and even onto the lounge room curtains!

A print also has the advantage of not needing any technology to view and can generally be readily found. For storing photos, I would swap a computer for an old shoe box any day!

But How Long Will My Photos Last?

Everything is subject to fading, but good quality photo chemistry made prints will normally last anywhere from 60 to 120 years. Some photo shops may be using materials that have a life of only twenty years. So it is a good idea to ask questions to see that the print service being offered fits your needs.

Prints Made at Home

This year, the Australian photo industry is predicting that photo stores will make nearly two billion prints. To this we have to add another 3 hundred million prints that will be made at home. These will be real photo quality pictures and made on photo quality printing paper and photo quality ink. This is important as they can last for over 100 years. Prints made on the home printer with normal paper and ink can fade faster than a politician’s promise!

Caring for Your Photos

Just like a painting, even good quality photo prints can eventually fade. But with a little care, you can leave the problem of fade to be fixed three or four generations later!

Framing

So the first rule is, don’t hang your photos on the wall where they will be hit by direct sunlight. That will certainly shorten their life. Solution: print one photo for display and one for the family album.

It’s a popular idea to stick photos on the fridge. Great fun, but gas from the fridge will cause the photo to fade faster. Solution, print one photo for the fridge and another for the family album.

Albums

Album storage is excellent, but make sure it is the right type of album. Mercifully those dreadful self-seal plastic page albums are disappearing from the stores. And none too soon either! The glue strips that rib the pages often contain a chemical that eventually eats into the emulsion of the photo!

Less of a problem, except to the archival purists, was the plastic covering itself. This too can eventually lead to a chemical interaction with the photo.

Electronic back up of your photos is very important, but a good quality photo album kept in a cool, dry place is definitely the best and safest way to keep your photos. It will become the family’s most treasured possession. We have all seen those dreadful television news scenes of bush fires attacking homes. But you will have noticed that it is not the computer that gets carried out first: it is the family album. Long may it live.

- Paul Curtis 2008