Digital Shutters

Photography itself has many terms and words and with the onset of digital photography the words seem to have taken on new meaning. One of those terms which has been around for awhile is archival. Archival comes from the word Archive which means a collection that consists of records which have been selected for permanent or long-term preservation. In museums objects are care for and stored in protective cases to preserve them.

Although the meaning hasn’t changed over the years, in recent years we have come to think of archival in a different way, instead of the painstaking care and protection given to something, it now becomes digital. Your computer will ask you if you want to archive your email. All it’s going to do is store it in a certain area on your hard drive. Compact disks, DVD’s are all archival storage media devices.

As you know with any photograph your printed image only has a certain length of time before it starts to fade. Many people are now restoring those old family photos and scanning and storing them on disks then create reproductions locking the valuable original in a safe deposit box. So how does this apply to your digital photography and why would you want to archive your library of images?
First you spent a lot of time and effort taking these photos and you do not want to loose them. As any photographer would tell you should keep a copy of your image in a place where it won’t get destroyed. Traditional Film Photographers keep their negatives archived. So you want to put your images on a CD for backup. The reason for this is if something were to happen to your computer you do not want to loose your photos. When you upgrade to a new computer you want an easy way to transfer your images to the new machine. Also if you are like me you take a lot of photos and over the years it’s easy to fill a hard drive on a computer. If I were to download all the images I have (over 100 CD’s full) I would easily fill my 120G hard dive and still probably not be able to get them all downloaded. Also if you back up your images on a CD it is easy to keep them organized by subject. You will want to use either CD’s and DVD’s the recent scan disks are a good way to transport an image but are not designed for long term storage, so they are not “archival”.
One suggestion and this is how I use my disks. I organize them by
• Subject
• Date the photo was taken
• File type. I take photos in JPEG, TIFF, and RAW format
• If it is for a client it is on a disk by itself with the clients name and date photos were taken.

PHOTO OF THE DAY
flooding from all the rain we have been having this summer