8 ms·

Yep. Historians are gonna find low-res digial camera pics extremely puzzling, as the quality of photography in their archives goes up and up and up from the in

Yep. Historians are gonna find low-res digial camera pics extremely puzzling, as the quality of photography in their archives goes up and up and up from the invention of photography - then completely plummets when people start using digital comaeras - then plummets to even worse than black and white photography from a hundred years ago, when it comes to shitty phone or web cams that happen to capture something interesting, then slowly climbs up again.

aangjie 13y ago
Haha ... i can imagine entire journals devoted to the field of Photography resolution historical changes and it's socio-cultural origins. :)
sheri 13y ago
I think it was a sacrifice of quality for the convenience of digital cameras. It was a great joy to be able to download and view photos immediately after taking them, rather than send the film to be developed. It was also extremely liberating when I realized I could buy a 1GB card and store photos taken over an entire trip. The freedom to not worry and keep clicking was a huge departure from the experience with standard 24 shot film rolls. I remember trips with my family where we'd spend lots of time just looking for shops selling film.
- redblacktree 13y ago
  > It was also extremely liberating when I realized [...] I was expecting something much different here. Something to do with the lack of a requirement for someone at the photography lab to view the photos while developing the prints. I know I found that liberating, ifyouknowwhatImean.
  - veidr 13y ago
    Sadly, the cycle has looped again, and there is once again someone in the "lab" looking at all your pictures, unless you eschew all modern conveniences like Apple's photo stream or Dropbox's autouploadapalooza. Which is basically, in terms of relative convenience, the equivalent of developing your own film in the 1990s...
    - redblacktree 13y ago
      I don't know. Hooking up a USB cable doesn't require a darkroom.
    - rmc 13y ago
      Not really the same thing. Yes, for anything you upload it's possible someone can look at it. That's very different from knowing that someone in your local neighborhood definitly looked at them.
- surge 13y ago
  For me, the most liberating thing was "not wasting film", I didn't have to worry about taking a bad shot and could take more risks or take pictures of just about anything without worrying about using up a finite amount of rather expensive film. If a picture was bad or shot from the hip and came out as something other then intended, I simply could now delete it and the space could be used by another photo. With film once that negative is exposed, that's it, you now wonder what picture you won't be taking now because you're going to run out of film sooner, so you wouldn't take as many pictures unless you spent a lot of time setting up the shot or posing, you lose a lot of in the moment opportunities. When I got my first digital camera, I went nuts with it on my trip that I bought it for, looking back at the photos I took years after, it was kind of obnoxious now that I think about it how often I pulled it out. Many times to the point of missing just experiencing the place/situation I was in rather then wanting to get a picture of the experience. Thankfully, the novelty wore off, but now I have to remind myself, "Hey, you have a camera, you should get a picture of this." or find myself realizing it a little too late.
sneak 13y ago
Historians likely won't, as the fragility of our media and our near-ubiquituous use of disk encryption will likely result in almost all of our modern data being either unreadable or unusable.
- piokuc 13y ago
  No worries, all the pictures will be safely archived by the NSA.
- pietro 13y ago
  Archivists are continually saving artifacts from our time, both analog and digital. There'll be plenty to study in the future.
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  Encryption, maybe. But I wouldn't count on fragile media remaining beyond the next 20 years. Some crystal based storage mediums have silly things done to them, like being heated to 1,000 degrees for two hours, to demonstrate their durability.
  - selter01 13y ago
    What is fragile media?
    - 6d0debc071 13y ago
      Well, by reasonable context anything you can't leave lying around for a couple of decades and expect to work, or stick in a reasonably constant environment and expect to be around in a hundred years. HDDs, optical discs - that sort of thing, I'd consider to tend to be fairly fragile. Anything that wouldn't be accessible to historians in the same sense that photographic stuff is basically.
      - wmil 13y ago
        Color film degrades fairly quickly. It won't last 100 years unless it's constantly climate controlled.
spyder 13y ago
Same with the monitors ( CRT => LCD )
justincormack 13y ago
No this trend was ongoing, with small convenient lower quality consumer cameras being introduced ever since the Brownie in 1899. The 35mm camera was worse than medium format but much cheaper and more convenient. Black and white from the late Victorian era can be stunning as lenses have got no sharper (in fact less sharp in the centre of field just more even and better for smaller film) while wet plate and albumen were a very well matched combination.
ryandvm 13y ago
Instagram filters are really going to throw them for a loop.
chiph 13y ago
Same with music reproduction. Edison cylinders to 78s, to LP records, to CDs, and then quality plunges with .ra and .mp3 files.
noblethrasher 13y ago
Historians won't but students in freshman level history classes probably will.
VMG 13y ago
Do you find it puzzling that people favored black-and-white TVs to cinema screens? I think historians will be able to figure this one out. Especially when people are aware of it at the time it's happening.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    Current historians view the 18th Century as part of the modern period (though most of it is the tail end of the early modern period.) So, to the extent that historians in the period of the future under consideration view the early 21st century the way historians now view the 18th, it won't be very hard for them to see it as modern times. Historians have broader perspective than you give them credit for.
- scott_karana 13y ago
  > Especially when people are aware of it at the time it's happening. I think this is the point: the poster was seemingly unaware that digital camera quality has been worse than analog until recently.

aangjie 13y ago

Haha ... i can imagine entire journals devoted to the field of Photography resolution historical changes and it's socio-cultural origins. :)

sheri 13y ago

I think it was a sacrifice of quality for the convenience of digital cameras. It was a great joy to be able to download and view photos immediately after taking them, rather than send the film to be developed. It was also extremely liberating when I realized I could buy a 1GB card and store photos taken over an entire trip. The freedom to not worry and keep clicking was a huge departure from the experience with standard 24 shot film rolls. I remember trips with my family where we'd spend lots of time just looking for shops selling film.

redblacktree 13y ago
> It was also extremely liberating when I realized [...] I was expecting something much different here. Something to do with the lack of a requirement for someone at the photography lab to view the photos while developing the prints. I know I found that liberating, ifyouknowwhatImean.
- veidr 13y ago
  Sadly, the cycle has looped again, and there is once again someone in the "lab" looking at all your pictures, unless you eschew all modern conveniences like Apple's photo stream or Dropbox's autouploadapalooza. Which is basically, in terms of relative convenience, the equivalent of developing your own film in the 1990s...
  - redblacktree 13y ago
    I don't know. Hooking up a USB cable doesn't require a darkroom.
  - rmc 13y ago
    Not really the same thing. Yes, for anything you upload it's possible someone can look at it. That's very different from knowing that someone in your local neighborhood definitly looked at them.
surge 13y ago
For me, the most liberating thing was "not wasting film", I didn't have to worry about taking a bad shot and could take more risks or take pictures of just about anything without worrying about using up a finite amount of rather expensive film. If a picture was bad or shot from the hip and came out as something other then intended, I simply could now delete it and the space could be used by another photo. With film once that negative is exposed, that's it, you now wonder what picture you won't be taking now because you're going to run out of film sooner, so you wouldn't take as many pictures unless you spent a lot of time setting up the shot or posing, you lose a lot of in the moment opportunities. When I got my first digital camera, I went nuts with it on my trip that I bought it for, looking back at the photos I took years after, it was kind of obnoxious now that I think about it how often I pulled it out. Many times to the point of missing just experiencing the place/situation I was in rather then wanting to get a picture of the experience. Thankfully, the novelty wore off, but now I have to remind myself, "Hey, you have a camera, you should get a picture of this." or find myself realizing it a little too late.

sneak 13y ago

Historians likely won't, as the fragility of our media and our near-ubiquituous use of disk encryption will likely result in almost all of our modern data being either unreadable or unusable.

piokuc 13y ago
No worries, all the pictures will be safely archived by the NSA.
pietro 13y ago
Archivists are continually saving artifacts from our time, both analog and digital. There'll be plenty to study in the future.
6d0debc071 13y ago
Encryption, maybe. But I wouldn't count on fragile media remaining beyond the next 20 years. Some crystal based storage mediums have silly things done to them, like being heated to 1,000 degrees for two hours, to demonstrate their durability.
- selter01 13y ago
  What is fragile media?
  - 6d0debc071 13y ago
    Well, by reasonable context anything you can't leave lying around for a couple of decades and expect to work, or stick in a reasonably constant environment and expect to be around in a hundred years. HDDs, optical discs - that sort of thing, I'd consider to tend to be fairly fragile. Anything that wouldn't be accessible to historians in the same sense that photographic stuff is basically.
    - wmil 13y ago
      Color film degrades fairly quickly. It won't last 100 years unless it's constantly climate controlled.

spyder 13y ago

Same with the monitors ( CRT => LCD )

justincormack 13y ago

No this trend was ongoing, with small convenient lower quality consumer cameras being introduced ever since the Brownie in 1899. The 35mm camera was worse than medium format but much cheaper and more convenient. Black and white from the late Victorian era can be stunning as lenses have got no sharper (in fact less sharp in the centre of field just more even and better for smaller film) while wet plate and albumen were a very well matched combination.

ryandvm 13y ago

Instagram filters are really going to throw them for a loop.

chiph 13y ago

Same with music reproduction. Edison cylinders to 78s, to LP records, to CDs, and then quality plunges with .ra and .mp3 files.

noblethrasher 13y ago

Historians won't but students in freshman level history classes probably will.

VMG 13y ago

Do you find it puzzling that people favored black-and-white TVs to cinema screens? I think historians will be able to figure this one out. Especially when people are aware of it at the time it's happening.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  Current historians view the 18th Century as part of the modern period (though most of it is the tail end of the early modern period.) So, to the extent that historians in the period of the future under consideration view the early 21st century the way historians now view the 18th, it won't be very hard for them to see it as modern times. Historians have broader perspective than you give them credit for.
scott_karana 13y ago
> Especially when people are aware of it at the time it's happening. I think this is the point: the poster was seemingly unaware that digital camera quality has been worse than analog until recently.