Wessex grasp the nettle of non-Digital Photographic sustainability

[BAJR]

Bring back the trained professional or the skilled photographer I should say.

the time to consider the shot, place the scales, get the light right... thats the important 30 shots. to go with teh 40,000 other wonky working shots with the bootprint and shovel in the background

Am with you there.

( and yes I have noticed )

[kevin wooldridge]

We've had to re-scan hard copies of a load of our old reports due to inability to open the files any more (and I'm sure one day they will eventually make it onto the interweb...?) .rtf was meant to be a 'permanent' format, but it seems one can't open them any more either....

I am really surprised about the comment on 'rtf' format. The latest version of Word has rtf compatlibility as does Libre as does Open Office writer....

[BAJR]

should have sent them to me I could have sorted it for a price
:face-approve:

[Wax]

Since I invested in a digital SLR my photographic skills have greatly improved I can afford to experiment as I do not have to spend money on the materials needed to develop and print film. I can look at each of those wonky shots and think how I might be able to do it better and even experiment there and then.

Whether digital will eventually make film redundant as the archaeological archiving medium is still open.

You can always print the really good images using high quality inks and paper.

however I think the medium is evolving too quickly for it to be the default for the archive unless data migration policies are built in. There is a real risk of data being unreadable in a few years. How many of you still have a working cassette player? I do but all the tapes are b.......

[Marc Berger]

sorry prentice but I am not who ever you think I am.

I don't like this draft policy because I don't think that it is demand driven. I think archaeology got into a habit of producing lots of images that have no proven use and if anybody ever looks at them again they will have to be heavily subsidised. As it is the last centuries images will cost a fortune which we don't have to keep them for the next hundred years. All that can happen to those images is that the images will be transformed to digital and the arguments will be about who pays for these old pictures and what resolution scan will be employed.

[SIZE=2][SIZE=2] The thing is that unlike Fuji biting the bullet and announcing that as there was no demand for its film, and that it could see no way that it could provide film at an affordable polluter pays price for archaeologists, it was going to have to stop production whereas Wessex appears to have to live by a mantra to justify taking pictures. Which they get out of the way in their first line:
[/SIZE]
Wessex Archaeology (WA) acknowledges the need for a high standard of photographic imaging for all types of projects undertaken.
[SIZE=2]
Who are they acknowledginging to? (and what photographic process are they referring to)

[SIZE=3]WA policy will be to rely on digital imaging to provide the sole photographic archive for any Terrestrial Fieldwork or Built Heritage project in England and Wales. This policy is in line with standards produced by English Heritage, the Institute for Archaeologists, the Archaeological Archives Forum and the London Archaeological Archive Research Centre.

They make it sound like all these institutions have stopped using film?
[/SIZE][/SIZE]
[/SIZE] What it seems to me that digital storage and processing was always offering is more autonomy to the digger and their archive. I would say over the last ten years there has been a compulsion to maintain the viability of museums by insisting that archaeological archives were created to their standards with part of the tenant being that bw slide film was the most "stable" but we diggers ignored the viability bit. So we have all gone around looking for bw slide film and at the same time using it less and less for ordinary pictures of incidental features. Whats been happening is that we have been using all sorts of digital formats and resolutions and whats going to happen is that like evolution there will be a survival of the fittest and what ever this fittest is will inhabit a niche. Unfortunately the niche used to be a museum and if Fuji made museums they would have stopped making them years ago. I don't know what it will be I don't think that it will be ADS and I don't understand the cloud.

[P Prentice]

sorry prentice but I am not who ever you think I am.

I don't like this draft policy because I don't think that it is demand driven. .

well the other geeza was occasionally funny, occasionally astute and occaisionally to drunk to post on a forum - i'm always like this.
and you are missing the wa point - they demand and they expect others to follow. let's see how many curators refuse them.

[Tool]

well the other geeza was occasionally funny, occasionally astute and occaisionally to drunk to post on a forum - i'm always like this.
and you are missing the wa point - they demand and they expect others to follow. let's see how many curators refuse them.

WA ain't the first to implement this, and there have been no problems with curators as far as I am aware, barring the stipulation that in addition to the digital images, a B&W film shot is taken of skeletons. Oh and Marc, has a 'bw slide film' ever been available?

[Marc Berger]

Quite right Tool http://www.ilfordphoto.com/Webfiles/20061291034093.pdf
and this shows that you can still get bw film: http://www.ilfordphoto.com/wheretobuy/bu...online.asp

Which leads back to Wessex's dictact based on Fuji stopping production of colour film as a reason to stop taking wet chemistry pictures and lumping bw in it as well? I was always under the impression that the bw film was the most preservable which was why we had to use it and meant that we had to have two cameras.

Wessex argument about archive seems a bit horse and cart:

While the archival stability of digital imaging has not yet been proven to the same degree as film,there is now considered to be no advantage of analogue over digital imaging as an archival format.

Presumably a consideration that if colour has gone bw will go as well?!! I don't quite see how the lack of wet chemistry film make the archival format of digital equal to analogue.

Anyway the Wessex final solution:

Finally, digital only photography offers a significant time and cost saving over the use of film and its adoption will therefore benefit the industry as a whole.

Well does it, what cost saving do they want? For a start if they can't get any film how do you work out the saving? I don't think that digital should be compared to wet. What's possibly wrong with the reasoning behind this policy is that it's about trying to replace analogue Pictures rather than seeing digital as different. What's going on is that the whole record is going digital and will go more digital. There are no cost savings to it, we will take as many digi pictures as we like as time budget inclination takes us. At some point perma trace will disappear. At some point if it hasn't already happened the average digital video frame will be ten megapixels. At some point we will eat up the whole site digitally. At some point 3d printers will recreate your site from your picture. At somepoint someone should point out that for the vast majority of watching brief sites no one will bother or have the space to print it out and that really society was paying archaeologists to go and hide the stuff because nobody wanted it around where they lived. Yes we got used to hiding it in a museum but they are inploding before our eyes. Found this glimps of the future http://www.blackmorevale.co.uk/Archaeolo...story.html

Entry to see the printing in the museum’s Victorian Gallery will be free with donations invited

. Thats where the problem is museums are free because....Does anybody know what this museum charges to archive- this came out last year http://www.socmusarch.org.uk/docs/Archae...s-2012.pdf

Thats solved everything

[Boxoffrogs]

we need small gifted gnomes in little boxes....

[Antipesto]

I see what you did there... ;-)