Those That Survive

Those That Survive

Backups. When we used film, in those halcyon days at the dawn of time, we didn't worry about backing up our images. We might not even have kept the negatives, although I always did. Ironically, the only damaged negatives I ever had were my Four Seasons at the Sheffield Fiesta ones, the subject of a previous blog, which were water damaged. When digital photography came along, suddenly everyone became paranoid about making sure that there were backups of everything. We had floppy backups, we had cartridge tape formats whoses names I have long forgotten, we had CDs, we fretted about the life expectancy of CDs, we had DVDs, we fretted about the life expectancy of DVDs....we had external hard drives, pen drives, and I'm running out of breath now with this sentence. Did we lose any images? Maybe, but probably not. Did we miss any that did get lost? Maybe but probably not. Do we ever look at the piles of CDs in particular that clutter the shelves? Maybe, but probably not. Will our heirs and descendents ever look at any of this? Highly doubtful, even if the formats are readable. I can still read floppy discs with an external A drive, but I'd be stumped with any formats older than that.

Convenience is a huge issue here, and I rarely look at the CDS and DVDs, but I do have pretty much all the files even from our first Compaq computer, with its brand new Windows 95. Those early CDs do actually still play, without any corrupted files. These days, small 1TB external USB drives are the backups and I can go back conveniently to about 2005. Last night I had a look and reprocessed a number of the early backups. They were all saved as TIFFs, so I resized and saved as JPEGs for this blog. Here's a few of my early favourites.

The Music of Love. Shot with components of this image all from Leigh Parish Church during an ADAPS photoshoot.



Ah, the red light of the darkroom, I remember it well.



The Mystery of Dark Woods, from my Blur Period.....



I kept photograhing Maxine until in 2007 I made the definitive image I was looking for. This is it.



Weigtless. A straight shot, no Photoshop trickery. I just jammed the mechanism so the balance was stuck in the horizontal position.



And if one red bucket should accidentally fall......



Going, going gone. A sad comment in that old couples often become just old ladies, who eventually leave this world as it was.



The garden at Levens Hall.



Girl at Haddon Hall, processed in Photoshop to make it look more like an Autochrome.



Wonderful light at St Malo cathedral



A wonderful French doorway.



Emma, resplendent in red.