Next era for found film?

[david_f._stein]

Interesting, when the version of this forum for digital cameras comes to be, I think there will be much greater

incidence of "found film" and "found images" than in the real film era. I've been collecting some early

digitals, and, yes, people do leave flash memory cards in the camera or, especially, those nooks and crannies of

larger cases, sometimes with images.

[rustys pics]

OK....so let's see some!

[michael_dimarzio]

Does anyone have a floopy drive for the old Mavica files?

[tjod]

Here's one I found on the memory card or a thrift-store digital:

 

http://www.pbase.com/tjod/image/94233793

 

Tim O

[User_503771]

Oh, I feel so badly for the person who took that photo! (Unless he/she downloaded it before getting rid of the camera. I hope so.)

 

That is just a terrific piece of work!

[connealy]

That's an interesting idea, and it will be interesting to see it develop. One of the differences that comes immediately to mind is that latent film images tend to deteriorate rather gracefully over time, and the unanticipated changes have their own charm. Digital images, on the other hand are either there, or they aren't; the loss of a single bit can be catastrophic.

[john carter]

Nice concept. Sometimes I wish I hadn't deleted all those images that I didn't want at the time. I might like them ten years down the road. I started with the Sony Mavica, 3.5 floppy disc, around 1998 or maybe even 1997.

[patrick j dempsey]

We have yet to see how stable flash media is, but floppy disks are pretty well much turning to junk by the day. The last time I attempted to access information stored on floppies and Zip disks from highschool and college (from the late 90's) much of the data had already corrupted and many of the disks were completely unreadable anymore. Data stored on CD's doesn't fare much better... many of the CDR disks have a projected life of 10 years, the ink inside the CD starts fading with time. Tape cassettes and 8-tracks have already proven to be very unstable over the years. We shall see!

[rustys pics]

Or not see.....

[john_shriver]

Modern flash media is not long-term stable. The "revolution" of NAND flash was that by making flash that had some bad and flaky bit, and could only remember for 10-20 years, and then piling Error Correcting Code on top of it, you get flash at much lower cost and higher density than NOR flash.

 

People who are using the "film" model and saving flash cards for the future may be very surprised in 20 to 30 years. The cells (bits) are just capacitors with charge stored on them, and the charge does leak away over time.

 

So reading a 50 year old flash may be a very "interesting" exercise. Maybe the NSA will be able to, but not mere mortals.

[david_f._stein]

John, thanks for that info-will look into it. May put some Compact Flash, etc. cards away long term as an experiment. I have had good luck with old floppies and CDs-stored away from the light.

[phil_sutcliffe]

John, maybe in years to come the deteriorating flash drives will give up images with something akin to that 'light leaky look' much loved by Gene M

[david_m]

You have to be careful because you have no legal right to publish such photos. The copyright remains with the photographer even if the photographer is unknown. Its unlikely anyone would complain but if you tried to make money from them, you could get in trouble.

[mike_elek1]

A corrupted digital image has no romanticism in the way that an old film image does. A corrupted digital image simply looks like crap.

[john fleshin]

Patrick, I did a project to archive images of stained glass for the church.

 

The research at the time seemed to point toward using the gold CDR's, which in bulk are about $1 each, and keep

them away from UV. I am interested in how flash memory will hold up, and there is an article I think this month on

dual 1 TB drives for back up. Have a box of photos some more than 100 years old, and someday will try some

storage, but wonder if the work will last longer in its present form.

 

David, lines are certainly not clear any more, especially for no profit use of abandoned material, and would think You

Tube would keep the lawyers busy? There is an Album cover out there with a shot I took of Steve Goodman in

Toronto. A credit would have been nice, but Steve's family benefits from the album.

 

I think I need to find some of my own film as well. ;-)

 

John