The dust and other spots imply a scan of a developed photo (not the negative, as the dust would be dark there, not bright).
And I'm amazed that people are amazed by photo quality from two decades ago. The resolution of standard 35-mm film was fairly hard to achieve in consumer digital cameras until recently (or maybe it still is, but I guess DSLRs have gone consumer enough by now).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> I'm amazed that people are amazed by photo quality from two decades ago
It's partly because the media (especially TV news) deliberately blurs and desaturates pictures to indicate what decade they are from. Which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the film technology of the time. But it is easy to forget that they are doing this and assume that the original photos are really like this. Why would 70s and 80s photos be desaturated more than 60s photos for example.
Are they doing this with tv shows and movies? Sometimes I am amazed to see how blurry some programs from the 80's seem. Even some movies that were shot in 35mm seem blurry. It must be the copy that they have at that tv and not the original roll. If not Idon't know what's happening here. Movies from the 40's seem to have better resolution than more modern ones.
Many shows were shot on 35mm film and then telecined to tape for editing and FX. Updating it to HD would mean going back to the camera negatives, figuring out which portions were used in which cuts, scanning it, re-conforming all the cuts and then re-doing all the FX.
Many TV shows are done from tape masters instead of the 35mm because of the cost of transferring them or that the originals were lost. The tapes vary in quality but a popular format (type-c 1 inch) used from the late 70s to late 90s is similar to DVD. Movies are always stored on 35mm which can be better than a blu-ray if scanned properly.
Many TV shows from the 80s and 90s were mastered on analog tape (U-Matic or Betacam) with variable quality (250 lines on U-Matic, 350 lines on Betacam SP) but very low by today standards.
Furthermore, these sources are often cropped/zoomed/stretched from 4:3 to 16:9, which lowers quality even more.
How many good pictures did people see from back then, I wonder. You print something up in a newspaper you're losing a lot of information, and the little palm size prints that shops used to do aren't exactly great either.
And then there's the difficulty of producing good pictures. I remember, when I was younger, my father gave me his old 35-mm. No auto focus, manual settings for everything. Even buying the right film required some knowledge of what you were going to be doing. I can see why people would find good pictures from that long ago surprising, it was harder to do - you had to invest time to get good at it. Even if you knew what you were doing from a technical perspective - You could shoot a roll of film and get three or four good pictures.
Heh. What I find surprising is how good the really old pictures are. Boer war/Victorian kinda things. Considering what they had to work with at the time.... There's some damn nice stuff out there. If you can get yourself a tour of a photographic archive from a newspaper or something, it's well worth doing ^_^ There's stuff there that's never been digitised just because there's so much of it and high resolution scans on something like a drum scanner are so expensive to do.
Edit:
> The resolution of standard 35-mm film was fairly hard to achieve in consumer digital cameras until recently
To be fair, the obsession some people have with resolution, without regard to like noise (goes up hugely when you cram more pixels - so to speak - into a small frame sensor) and colour balance has probably done significant harm to the evolution of digital cameras.
Not that I'm saying you are one of those people, but thought I'd mention it for random readers ^^;
I think we have a mental image of crappy VHS-esque images and whatnot (from that time)... but if people actually went back and scanned film images with good modern scanners, you'd have some awesome quality stuff.
I'd say resolution/sharpness in consumer digital cams has surpassed film, but digital (personal opinion) lacks the tones, depth, highlight-details, and overall 'magic' look of film :)
And I'm amazed that people are amazed by photo quality from two decades ago. The resolution of standard 35-mm film was fairly hard to achieve in consumer digital cameras until recently (or maybe it still is, but I guess DSLRs have gone consumer enough by now).