Archival - This concerns the other end of a photographers workflow from the ease of use considerations brought up earlier. Archival is all about saving your images in such a fashion that allows ease of use and safe storage. There are a million ways to tackle this challenge and some are more appropriate for some folks over others. For example, archival techniques used by a power photographer shooting 25,000 images a year may not be appropriate for the serious amateur only shooting 10,000 images on a good year. By the way, I consider myself a prolific shooter and I average dealing with 5,000 new images each of the last three years.

The challenges with archiving film are the same as storing it before we shot the image. While refrigeration isn't needed, you still need to respect films relative delicate nature. Environment is a significant factor when considering how you're going to save images in the long term. A single scratch in the wrong spot can ruin an image forever. Further, you almost never deal with duplicates in the film world. Since image quality degrades so quickly or it's cost prohibitive when making duplicates, they're rarely used to make final prints. Obviously there's a problem with routinely using these irreplaceable one of a kind assets. Next, how do your keep track of all these images? There's a desire to have a database that's readily sortable and able to point you right to the correct image. This is a difficult challenge requiring thoughtful planning with a consideration for growth potential. One of my least favorite obligations surrounding archiving my film images was labeling all those slides. I printed out thousands upon thousands of labels and put them on each and every slide in my library. In three years we're talking 15,000 images, 15,000 labels. Does this sound like a lot of drudgery. It was. One last thing. Over the years, lots of experience was developed about the longevity of film. Dependent on the type and the storage environment, there are very well defined characteristics of film archival qualities. Essentially film users know with confidence how good their images will look years and years from now. As you'll see, that can't necessarily said about digital. I'll get into that more here in a bit.

Digital does a lot more for you automatically. The simple effort of labeling your images is significantly reduced with digital files. Each and every image is individually coded in the camera allowing little if any effort on your part to apply your own file numbering standards. On the market today there are dozens of image browsers that facilitate this process tremendously. Next, making exact copies of your images is a snap. It's a simple matter to duplicate your files using any computer. The best part of this is your copies are exact duplicates of the originals. This means you can archive your originals without fear of harming them and work on duplicates without suffering through any image degradation. This is awesome. The problem becomes how long your digital files will last. The digital revolution in photography is no different from any other digital revolution. You've seen file formats come and go as time as passed. Does anyone work on a Wordperfect format? Does anyone know if you can even open those files using today's software. The problem here is the digital revolution is quick on obsolescence and short on longevity. Since technology and formats are moving so fast, there big open questions on what will work 40, 20, or even 10 years from now. It's a very difficult and nerve wracking situation. Not only that, there are significant concerns about the long term archival characteristics of home made DVD's and CD's. Essentially they degrade over time dependent on environment and are untrustworthy as you only backup source.

Where does this leave us? As much as I love the ease and flexibility of digital archiving, the long term issues have me and others concerned. Honestly, all we can do is take a wait and see stance since we're so heavily involved with digital ourselves.

Advantage - Even

Print Quality - To me photography is about two things; shooting the image and making prints. The print side of things probably comes from my dad building a wet darkroom in our basement back when I was 10 years old. He put it on our unused ping pong table in our unventilated basement. I didn't have a concern at all. I only cared about watching that image materialize in developer. While I didn't have much of an archive of my images, I printed and printed my images just to see what they looked like in real life. Move along 25 years later when I got into nature photography, I still wanted to see the hard print verses looking through a lupe at my image.

If you print at home, the difference in quality between digital and film really comes down to file size the image quality. Pixel per Pixel I think digital files are superior to identically sized scans of film. The sharpness, contrast, reduced noise, and overall quality of a digital capture is better than similarly sized scan of an analog film. What does this mean in terms of print quality. Within the capabilities of the digital file, a print digital file will be better than print from a film scan. There are distinct size limits to how far you can expand digital files while still maintaining a high quality. On the other hand, film in general holds tremendously more information than a simple digital capture. A 2900 dpi scan of a 35mm slide film will produce a 26mb file while the corresponding 2.74 mp Nikon D1h image file is only 7.5 mb's. Clearly you can enlarge the scan more than the digital capture, there's more information to use. Getting back to what I mean, digital files are great for printing as long as you stay within their limits. On the other hand, Scans of film have a lot broader capability especially when it comes to making larger prints. Now, if you're like most of photographers that print at home, there's little if any need for prints larger than 13x19 inches, the most common large print of serious photographers. I routinely made 10x15 inch prints on a 13x19 inch sheet from relatively small Nikon D1h captures. So, is the extra information available with a 35mm analog film scan that important? I don't think so. In fact, the extra information will have a tendency to bog down a digital darkroom by forcing it to deal with larger files.

Advantage - Digital