A woman finds an undeveloped roll of film with photos of the Mt. St. Helens eruption

 

Unseen photos of Mt. St. Helens eruption discovered in forgotten camera at Goodwill

 

We've now had two decades of digital cameras. There are going to be some equally newsworthy discoveries on old memory cards and DV tapes over the next decade or two.

A camera was discovered in the debris of the World Trade Center collapse, with memory cards intac, containing photos of the disastert. More recently a camera dropped in the ocean was recovered and returned to the owner, who identified photos published on social media.

Hard to imagine there will be any event, from a birthday party to a Martian landing, that there won’t already be cell phone pics of. I mean, isn’t every lunch already being documented? How could photos of any event be discovered that there wouldn’t already be a bazillion pictures of?

I recall a number of years back when the Liberty Bell 7 spacecraft was recovered and there was some hope that a 16mm movie camera in the capsule had survived. It would have shown-among other things-if Grissom had done something that caused the hatch to blow prematurely(although it was determined that he didn't by other means).

 

In any case, the case holding the camera had unfortunately leaked. I suspect that-had it been freshwater-it might have been salvageable even then provided that the film was kept wet until it could be developed. Unfortunately, in the early days of photography, salt water was found to be a fixer-just not a very good one. Even a not-so-good fixer will probably completely clear the film ~40 years, though.

There are some examples of early photographs recovered from polar expeditions--

These 100-Year-Old Photos Were Uncovered From The Antarctic Ice

Hard to imagine there will be any event, from a birthday party to a Martian landing, that there won’t already be cell phone pics of.

Service on Mars,who knew! Plenty of places here on Earth (small mercies) still without coverage.

You don’t need coverage to take a pic with a cell phone.

Whatever, almost never carry one.

This found film stuff is very interesting to me, gives a look at a different time without editing or a professional approach, just everyday pics. There used to be a guy here that did a lot of found film, Gene M I think. He seems to have dropped out.

 

Rick H.

A Portland woman who finds old cameras and develops forgotten film has discovered unseen photos of the Mount St. Helens eruption.

 

Unseen photos of Mt. St. Helens eruption discovered in forgotten camera at Goodwill

 

We've now had two decades of digital cameras. There are going to be some equally newsworthy discoveries on old memory cards and DV tapes over the next decade or two.

 

Except that memory cards aren't meant for long term storage. The NAND cells leak electrons over time and will eventually be unreadable. The effect is worse in higher capacity cards. A card left unused might be unreadable in 5 to 10 years. Mount St Helens erupted almost 40 years ago.

 

I don't want turn this into a film vs digital debate since I'm a happy user of both technologies and even my film ends up getting stored digitally. But my strong belief is that if you want your digital images to be around and accessible over the long haul, you need a plan, - more so than with film. And that plan may have to include moving them from time to time as technology changes and cloud/storage services come and go.

 

A couple of months ago I was given a bunch of old cameras. One had some undeveloped film in it. It's at least 30 years old. I haven't done anything with it yet but I'm sure I could get some images off of it. That's not so likely to be the case for people trying to get images off 30 year old SD cards.

 

One last thing I'll add, About this time of year is when I complete an annual ritual, - making a photo book for Mother's day. I've been being it for about 15 years now and these will get passed on to the kids. I'll do my best to keep the digital copies of those and other pictures around for them, but at least I know that they'll have these books, - unless a fire or some other disaster destroys them

Edited April 29, 2018 by tomspielman

Its fun finding lost images. I think APUG once had a found film section where people would post their images from rolls in flea market cameras or found somewhere n processed.

 

Its also an art developing found film with latent images taken so long on expired film that sat in in harsh environments.

A photo album, or shoe box full of negatives are hard to lose, and take real purpose to dispose. A digital picture is like trying to keep track of a dust particle. They're invisible, and these days can be on any of a dozen electronic vaults like phones, tablets, clouds, and Lord knows how many old useless computers. They have no mass, no shape, no heft, only a cryptic name - DSCN_355534.NEF.... is that Sally's graduation picture? I've never lost a photo album.

A digital picture is like trying to keep track of a dust particle. They're invisible, and these days can be on any of a dozen electronic vaults like phones, tablets, clouds, and Lord knows how many old useless computers. They have no mass, no shape, no heft, only a cryptic name - DSCN_355534.NEF.... is that Sally's graduation picture?

Sounds like you need a much better digital naming and filing system. A digital picture is like trying to keep track of a dust particle only if one hasn't kept up with technology and doesn't understand how digital storage works and how relatively easily it can be managed. If I had taken Sally's graduation picture, I'd title the file something along the lines of . . . oh, I don't know . . . let's try, "Sally's Graduation Picture." If someone leaves an important picture titled DSCN_355534.NEF and leaves it loosely floating around a hard drive like a speck of dust instead of in a folder labeled in some thematically relevant way, I don't think they should blame digital media for their own blatant negligence.

I gave up on naming any digital photograph outside of those saved in PSD format--and collaterally their jpg/png progeny, if any. It was just too much crap even with bulk renaming operations. I discovered I was spending more time cataloging the damned things than I was taking, viewing, and perhaps printing a few of them. My strategy for the past decade had been file folders. So if there is a family birthday, the structure would be: Photos|Birthdays|2017|Anthony .I have a schema for many things.

 

"Art" images are stored differently--as candidate files, 'under development', or 'print ready.' Works for me and that's what counts. And albums are awfully easy to lose permanently. A fire in 1984 destroyed every image of current and multigenerational family history. At least with the digital, I can always feel fairly confident that with Amazon Glacier and several regularly incremental backups elsewhere that all will not be lost. Until I croak that is, and then who cares?

Yes, right. A better digital filing system indeed. In '99 I bought a 3MP camera and had a Mac computer with some version of iPhoto. Also had a mac laptop, and in quick succession owned iMacs of at least 3 versions, and also traded up cameras thrice before moving from Mac to PC My wife had about as many Mac computers. By 2006 or so there was 'digital dust' spread out over a dozen PC and Mac hard drives, attempted backups to DVD, externals HDs and the like. JPGs, RAWs, TIFFs, PSDs and then all the versions. Drives went bad, DVDs wouldn't read and so on. Problems I'm sure only we had with computers. At some pointI had to get all the Mac files onto Windows under say, Lightroom. Did I get them all? How many duplicates occurred from copying sources that had already been copied? How to trudge through thousands of images? But then along came all the cloudy weather, and I had Google raising my photos to their cloud and Amazon's cloud and Microsoft's cloud and my wife still had Apple so there was that cloud. Then there were all the software programs used on the different platforms to *cough* organize and process photos. These files are directly modified, and I am saving versions, but these files have sidecars with them. How to move from This to That software or new computer? Then along came cameras in telephones and after 5 different phones apiece and who even knows what clouds those involved anymore, I could rightly say I had photos strewn throughout the electro-magnetic universe.

 

I'm not a perfectionist, so no, I did not individually name 20,000 images with wonderful descriptive names like "Sally's Graduation No. 38." Or, "Tall white building on Elm Street in Albuquerque." I know that's what everyone else does, but I never had the hours in the day to sit at the computer naming 300 images of which 99% would eventually be regarded as 'failed attempts."

 

I compare all that to the 'pre digital age' where I could open the shoebox, pullout a transparent holder of 35mm film negatives, hold it up to the light and in 1 nanosecond discover "Sally's Graduation" photos, or those lousy shots of the "Tall White Building in Albuquerque."

 

Just sayin'.

I think your chosen digital lifestyle is what dooms you, not digital technology per se. And I hope you and your wife realize how eccentric your computer habits are. Also, I wasn’t suggesting naming every photo you take. I was suggesting naming the important ones, maybe just the ones you print or share with people or have meaning special enough that you might want to find them at a future date. If you have 20,000 negatives completely unorganized, you’d be in no better shape than your practices with 20,000 digital files. You’re letting the dust pile up, never really taking out a dust rag or vacuum cleaner and then bemoaning the fact that things are a mess. Your digital behavior over the years is comparable to having several homes, several divorces under your belt, moving back and forth across country a few times, tossing your stuff into cheap cartons that won’t adequately withstand the move, and living through a few hurricanes and earthquakes. Your negatives, in a comparable analog life to the digital life you seem to live, would have long been destroyed or misplaced as well. If you have 20,000 negatives or prints and can find what you’re looking for with relative ease, it’s because you’ve set up a system and organized them in much better fashion than whatever it is you’ve made of your collection of digital files. How many shoeboxes need you look through if they’re not labeled and organized to find 1 in 20,000 photos? Your comparison simply doesn’t hold water.

 

Just sayin’ . . .

"And I hope you and your wife realize how eccentric your computer habits are."

 

Uh, that's very aggressive, and totally unnecessary. We happen to make our professional living on computers, and your assessment that our habits are eccentric is ludicrously uniformed. Are you always like this? My suggestion is to stick with SUBJECT MATTER and leave personal characteristics, psycho-babble, and uninformed accusations in your mind and not type them into posts.

 

One's experiences "are what they are." You must be of an age to know that, right? If your experience is different, talk about that imn place of trying to deny mine.

FWIW - and of course open to others' denial of my personal experience, in the 20 years I have had digital cameras, and lots of friends with them too, I have had many people describe the same frustration with the intangible nature of digital files for photos, music, documents, letters, downloads, emails and so forth.

 

Until 20 minutes ago, I didn't realize this was such an unusual complaint!

You make your professional living on computers and haven’t figured out a way to organize your photos so they don’t turn to dust. OK. Good to know. Thanks for the information.

 

I bet a lot of people who have similar complaints about keeping track of their digital photos have shoeboxes full of snapshots lying around an attack somewhere as well, in disarray. That just means they haven’t bOthered to organize them. It doesn’t mean dealing with snapshot prints is an insurmountable task. If they had to find a graduation photo from 10 years ago, they likely wouldn’t be able to find it unless they’d taken the time to put it in a photo album. If they had hundreds of photo albums from over the years, they’d have had to label or identify them and store them all in some reasonable way or they’d have a whole lot of trouble finding the picture.

 

The so-called ethereal and intangible nature of digital info seems much more a problem for those who weren’t born into the digital age. Ethereal and intangible though it may seem, it’s data. It can be organized and managed.

Sounds to me like you have different experiences than I do - imagine that - people with differing life experiences!

 

FWIW - and always subject to the denial by strangers on forums - I have 3 shoe boxes with casual snapshots in them dating back to the 1960s. They are automatically in chronological order because, uh, that's how they were taken and subsequently put in the box. I can find any little group of photos in less time than my Windows 10 computer takes to boot up.

 

Personal experience is a funny thing. I once bet a guy that I could type a letter on my portable typewriter faster than he could do it on a cold PC using WordPerfect and his Epson dot matrix printer. Of course I won, otherwise I wouldn't be relating the experience. And, mine looked infinitely better too.

 

Don't be too quick to assume you know, and can invalidate, the life experience of others, especially strangers.

 

There's no argument to win here. I simply related my personal experience with digital files over many years. I didn't claim it was universal, or right, or better than any other person's experience.

I simply related my personal experience with digital files over many years. I didn't claim it was universal, or right, or better than any other person's experience.

Here's the text of your original post on the subject. It doesn't read as if you're simply relating your personal experience with digital files over many years. And that's why I disagreed with you. I wasn't questioning that you've had what experiences you've had. I was questioning the categorical statements you made about the difference between negatives and digital data. Your descriptions were pretty colorful and illustrative and didn't for one minute seem to limit themselves just to how you experience them. As a matter of fact, the only personal pronoun you used in that initial post comes in the very last sentence which is the only few words that are about your personal experience. You began with a bunch of clear, theoretical statements which you never suggested was just about your own experience, but seemed to apply much more broadly, at least by the way you presented them. Perhaps you will consider the difference between saying "A photo album, or shoe box full of negatives are hard to lose, and take real purpose to dispose" and "I've never lost a photo album or shoe box full of negatives . . ." Please don't blame me for reading what YOU wrote and don't blame digital into for a user's inability to effectively manage it.

A photo album, or shoe box full of negatives are hard to lose, and take real purpose to dispose. A digital picture is like trying to keep track of a dust particle. They're invisible, and these days can be on any of a dozen electronic vaults like phones, tablets, clouds, and Lord knows how many old useless computers. They have no mass, no shape, no heft, only a cryptic name - DSCN_355534.NEF.... is that Sally's graduation picture? I've never lost a photo album.

I found it. Me and Susie on first date. Love those show boxes.

Except that memory cards aren't meant for long term storage. The NAND cells leak electrons over time and will eventually be unreadable. The effect is worse in higher capacity cards. A card left unused might be unreadable in 5 to 10 years. Mount St Helens erupted almost 40 years ago.

That's a good point. And that's probably why you can't put a video game on a CF card and call it a 'cartridge'! But some phones that are older than 10 years old probably do have readable photos on them, right?

That's a good point. And that's probably why you can't put a video game on a CF card and call it a 'cartridge'! But some phones that are older than 10 years old probably do have readable photos on them, right?

 

Oh sure. The problem is that as you increase the amount of data stored in the same physical space, the leakage problem becomes more pronounced. So let's say for the sake of argument there's a 60% chance that a phone built in 2008 that was found in a drawer will still work or will otherwise have recoverable photos on it.

 

The chances are much less that a phone built today being found in a drawer 10 years from now will have recoverable photos on it. The errors occur on a regular basis even on new working phones and SD cards. The controllers just compensate for those errors. But more errors will occur over time until the controllers can no longer compensate and then the images are gone.

 

The reason this isn't a bigger worry is that neither phones nor SD cards are intended to be the final resting place for photos. They're supposed to get transferred to something else and we're supposed to upgrade our phones every few years. With film and prints, they were stuck in frames, photo albums, and shoe boxes. Digital photos end up in albums or just as files on your computer or in the cloud. But not many people think about how they can keep these photos accessible after they're die or even 20 years from now if the cloud provider goes out of business or the account expires.

 

Let's be clear. Plenty of negatives and prints don't survive for decade upon decade either. Prints on display in a frame will fade. Photos kept in a hot attic or garage probably won't age too well either. Floods, fire, and accidental trashings can take out film as well.

 

I believe that as long as you're vigilant, your digital photo collection will survive will into the future and will be as good as they were the instant you completed the post work on them. But for right now at least, I think film requires a lot less vigilance to stick around.

I'd be happy if I could just find my own lost images. You know, the ones that, when I shot them, were obviously going to be some of the greatest images ever made, but when I developed the film, there were just the ordinary crummy shots I usually get. Somehow the good stuff that was going to make me rich and famous had vanished.