January 2020

“Grandpa, - where did all the pictures go?”

“Well there here pet, in this cardboard box”

“No, not those old ones of you as a kid, where are the ones of me with mum and dad?”

“Oh, you mean those ones, we don’t have those anymore”

I waited for the inevitable.

“Why?”

“Well, those my dear, were what we called digital pictures.”

“I don’t understand, we have digital pictures today, my watch shows digital pictures and MPEG10 movies. So where are all the ones of me as a baby?”

 “Ah yes, but the first digital pictures didn’t last. Sure, I have them on a CD, zip disk or memory card somewhere but we have nothing to read it with.” I sat back. “Ah yes, those were the days. Each week would bring a different camera, a few more megabytes and another inkjet printer to tempt us. The prints they made didn’t last, even though we were told all kinds of things to the contrary, but they looked nice, if kind of different. We didn’t print many anyway, due to the cost of ink, so most times we would look at them on the back of the camera and just say, hmm that’s nice. Even though there were some guys who warned us that the images weren’t as good and didn’t last as long, we didn’t listen. It was exciting and cool. It was a crazy time. I had collected and improved my camera system for years and pouuff, overnight, I couldn’t give them away, they was so un-cool. There was this thing called eBay and people sold their unwanted cameras for peanuts. I mean, why would you want a boring film camera when you could take digital pictures with a mobile telephone?”

“Grandpa, you say the funniest things, what’s a CD?”

“CD’s replaced records,… oh hell ! ”

I gulped and with some embarrassment, since I was part of the problem, started to explain:

“Well you know for the first 150 years, photographs were made with a thing called film. It was made from a plastic sheet with a gloup made from animal bones and salts of silver.” I hesitated, “err, actually, that is not strictly true, in the beginning, glass plates were covered in chemicals to make them sensitive to light and even now, 200 years later, if we had black and white paper, we could make prints from them today.”

“Black and white?”

“Er, I’ll come to that. As I was saying, people used this thing called film for ages. In the beginning film could not record colour, only light and dark. That is what we call black and white. Although it went out of fashion when colour images first appeared, it always stuck around, as it produced the most expressive images. Come to think of it, they’re the ones I still like today. Anyway, the first cameras were huge, then they got smaller, and then increasingly, amateurs used bigger cameras again. Film was great. Loads of people made it. It was cheap and anyone could print anyone else’s pictures, no matter how old they were. We used to have a spare room, which we blacked out and called a darkroom, where we would bathe the film in different chemicals to make the image appear. It was like magic. I loved black and white, it was kind of arty, you could interpret an image and make it suit your mood. I still have some of my prints from 60 years ago, just like the day they were made. I could go out on a sunny day and take an image, which would capture the shadows and clouds at the same time. You didn’t have to use the artificial cloud filter in Photoshop 22.”

“Grandpa, you’re not making any sense, if film was so great, why did you change?”

“Well digital was new. All the magazines told us how great it was, even the respected journals. You have got to realise that film cameras had nowhere to go, the manufacturers had run out of things to change and advertise. They did try some weird things, like Disc cameras and APS, but they were not very popular. Digital cameras were exciting. Every model was better than the last and it was really cool to have a camera with more megapixels than your buddy. The camera companies stopped advertising film cameras and just went on and on about the latest digital gizmo. Even though they were selling good old film cameras, you often wouldn’t realise from their websites. You would keep on hearing that digital was better than film, in the end you just believed it, even though it wasn’t entirely true. Over time you just enthused about all the things that they improved, even though it was something taken for granted with film.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, the best one was digital black and white, even though you could make a beautiful rich black and white print on silver based paper, you kept on persuading yourself that the matt inkjet prints, or worse still the gloss prints with all kinds of strange coloured bands were as good. No one wanted to speak out. It was crazy, like your storybook here, ‘The Emperor’s new clothes”

“But grandpa, didn’t the people who made the film complain?”

“No, they just cut their ranges and production across the world. You see, they had realised the threat that digital imaging would make to their sales, so they got into digital imaging themselves, though it lost them money, and started making, scanners, inkjet paper and printers. I remember thinking at the time it was kind of weird. I guess they thought that the new technology would have better long term shareholder value”.

“What is shareholder value?”

“It is another way of saying short term greed”

“Can we go back to film and black and white then?”

“It might be possible but it’s unlikely. When the photographic companies shut down their film and paper plants, they got rid of the people who knew all about it. Their expertise had accumulated over the generations and suddenly was lost. A few small companies stayed around for a while but their products were never as good as the big 3 and one by one, their decided to go over to digital products too. I think you can still make your own chemicals but without reliable film and paper, it is a bit pointless. You know, come to think of it, it’s ironic, of all my old cameras, the film ones still work, it’s my digital ones that don’t, you can’t get the batteries anymore.”

“Is this going to happen to the pictures I have taken?”

“No pet, Epson have said, categorically, that their last printer doesn’t have that problem”