Money And Investing  -

Digital Media

15 12 05 18 16

-------- Not Free

Digital photography offers the ability to take as many photos as you want, without being concerned about film rolls or developing fees.  That is, for as long as you have space on your memory card.  There are times when digital media doesn't mean photography is free of 'film developing' cost and time, it just changed into 'media backups and storage management'.

With 5 and 6 mega pixels cameras, commonly available on today’s markets, filling up a 1GB camera card doesn’t take too long.  Then the issue of backing up the memory arrives - so that you can take more pictures.

At home it is fairly easy:  you download them to your home computer and burn them on a 30 cent CD-Recordable (two if you use a 1Gb Card).  On business travel you you’re your laptop. 

However, on our quasi-adventure traveling style, the only alternative is to pay for a photo lab or internet café to burn them to a CD-R (or more than one).  Usually you can get this work done for less than $10 USD in most places around the world (2CDs for a 1Gb Card). 

Waiting for the photos can be an issue.  In some cases is about half an hour per CD or more.  We have found places where they burn them in 15 minutes with fast equipment, but when you have multiple cards to service it is still quite an amount of time, specially when we do not spend too much time on the same place.  This forces us to schedule film cards downloads during downtime, internet time, or meals. 

Digital media has many advantages beyond the ones mentioned.  You don’t have to scan the negatives or prints if you want to use them on a website either - they are ready.  The files can be stored on CDs or DVDs, which take less space than a case of negatives.  And you can print them again and again and get the exact same results, as the negatives don’t deteriorate.

Even then there are issues:  Digital media doesn’t last forever:  it lasts less than the old fashioned negatives, so you have to re-burn your CDs and DVDs every five years or so.  You also should keep multiple copies of them:  a scratch on a negative harms only one photo, but a scratch on a DVD harms your entire trip. 

And then there is the issue of showing off the photos.  In my humble opinion, nothing can beat the old fashioned table photo album.  People can flip through the pages as fast or as slow as they feel (not like a slideshow).  They can concentrate more on the ones they really care, and ignore those that disgust them.  The closest I have found to that is an online photo album (request access if interested).  But any method you use requires effort in organizing the photos.  I may argue it takes as long to organize the photos as it took to take them, but probably the act of taking them resulted a lot more interesting.  Yet, if not organized, your photo taking effort goes up in vain.

Digital Media doesn’t solve all of the issues.  It adds flexibility.  But you still have to digitally ‘develop’ the photos, store them safely, and organize them for presentation to friends and family.  The same activities we had to do before, just in a more flexible and fun way.