Mark Weaver wrote:



Yes, negatives and prints can be digitized and, once that is done, it is
easy to share them (either digitally or by making more prints). But
scanning is slow and tedious. In contrast--making copies of image that are
digitial in the first place is extremely fast, cheap, and easy and, so is
much more likely to happen.

Where the quality of digital is up to the end use of the image,
then that convenience is of course dominant. The higher end
digital cameras certainly can be used for 95% of photography.
But there remain uses of film images that digital can't yet
match, and so film thrives. There are the digital holdouts who
stick to film for a variety of reasons, which include
stubborness, tradition, investment, etc, ad nauseum (as too often
debated in these groups).

If one were to scan 20 years worth of negatives and slides, it
would be tedious at best. But if he selects the images really
worth scanning, it shouldn't be so bad.

Sharing? A friend returned from a trip to Corsica recently with
nearly 600 images on her P&S digital camera. I 'donated'
webspace to her (360MB) to gen links and send around... that is
two weeks worth of images. I've urged her to cut it down to,
say, 100 images, but to date she hasn't dug in to do it. The
effort of downselecting is in fact made worse due to her
prolifigate rate of image production. I've looked at many, and
as vacation snaps go, many are very well composed and interesting
.... but not 600 worth.

IOW, there has been an exchange of tedium. One set of work
abandoned and a new set of work created.

Cheers,
Alan


--
--e-meil: there's no such thing as a FreeLunch.--