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Comment by logicallee | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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...

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.

I don't know. Hooking up a USB cable doesn't require a darkroom.

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.

Archivists are continually saving artifacts from our time, both analog and digital. There'll be plenty to study in the future.

No worries, all the pictures will be safely archived by the NSA.

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.

What is fragile media?

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.

Color film degrades fairly quickly. It won't last 100 years unless it's constantly climate controlled.

Shouldn't factory-pressed CDs and DVDs last indefinitely?

It's easy to think that, but no. The materials will degrade and the data will become unreadable sooner than you think, probably on the order of 10s of years, depending on the manufacturing quality.

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

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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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.

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

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

Same with the monitors ( CRT => LCD )

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