Old Disposable Camera

[Kestra]

It's not so much that I'm saying it's superior or maybe even comparable (I don't know enough about the methods to say either). But we have so many photos and I'm sure enough of them will survive that there won't be a dark age even if no digital images can be accessed.

 

[Amaris]

There's no need to worry, Trekker. Digital technology isn't going anywhere for a long, long, time. There are also digital archives that contain millions of photos, not to mention the multiple redundancy of the internet, which allows images to be saved in multiple locations all around the world. It would take a worldwide destructive event to take that out, and if that happened, pictures would be the last thing on your mind and the least of your worries.

 

[TorontoTrekker]

This is all very timely for me - I'm moving in 11 days (*gulp*) and my ex-bf wants me to send him pictures. I found two disposable cameras while I was packing - one was still sealed in the package. I'll have to find which box I put them in, out of the 72 I've packed so far...

 

[Mr Awe]

So I have this really old disposable camera, remember them? I mean, there's a date on the bottom that says I should get the film developed before 04/2004. Is the film completely destroyed by now? And if it wasn't, is there any possible way to still get this developed?

It's not super important because it's probably all garbage pics anyway, but I'm curious, you know?

I'd imagine that the pictures are there but degraded. A lot depends on storage conditions. If it were in a cool, dry, and dark place, they're probably pretty good. Hot, humid, bright, not so much.

Why not just develop it and see? For $5 or so, you can find out!

Mr Awe

 

[TheSeeker]

A few years back, maybe in the early 2000s, I found my sister's old camera at my dad's house and it still had a roll of film in it which was partially finished. I decided to snap a bunch of pictures to use the roll up and had the film developed just for the hell of it. The quality had certainly diminished but you could still clearly make out what the pictures were.

The first half of the roll contained pictures from the mid 80s when my sister went on a school exchange program!

 

[Mr Awe]

It's sort of sad that, apparently, actual film photos are such a rarity these days. We really will likely have a "dark ages" of this time period considering there really won't be much photographic record of today since the digital medium isn't exactly great when it comes to longevity.

My family has a century-plus old photograph of a paternal great-grandfather and his family. It's a very old photograph, obviously, and shows it's age, it's very delicate it's cracked and a couple pieces of it are missing around the edges. But it's a real, actual, photograph of people who have been dead for a century.

I have a printing of a digital picture taken of myself from just a few years ago that's already damaged because of the delicate-nature of the ink on the paper.

It's not going to be anything like that. In fact, quite the opposite. 100 years from now, people will have their digital files which won't be degraded one bit. The pictures will look like they were taken that very day.

Sure, some people will have files lost over time, just like people will have prints lost or destroyed. Or just fall apart eventually. So, that part hasn't changed. What has changed is that the surviving files will be pristine.

You point out prints made from digital files. You can get good quality prints from a professional photo developer. Also, prints are really the exception these days. Most pictures are viewed on a screen.

So, the future of photos is actually looking really bright, and sharp and clear to boot!

Mr Awe

 

[FordSVT]

It really makes me wonder if my grand children or great-descendants are even going to know what I looked like or what anything looked like from this time period. Do you think they're still going to be using jpegs and gifs 100 years from now? Do you think a printed photo of you is going to survive 100 years of being kept in a variety of boxes, books and folders, exposure to elements and varying temperatures?

So it sort of saddens me to see people wondering if places even personally handle film processing anymore, or to see movies or other media being made in a digital format. This may really be a "dark age" for people living in the future. It's difficult if not impossible to even get a simple piece of software made a decade ago to work on a present-day computer, as time goes on and backwards-compatibility stops supporting the more distant generations of software all of those CDs, DVDs, eventually Blu-Rays and so forth will become less and less useful, even now diskette drives are a thing of the past.

Sigh.

Sorry, not to be a downer but... it's just shocking to me how much is going to be lost to our descendants.

Dude.... they're just going to look at your online social page/Future Facebook to see your pictures.

I think you're underestimating technology.

.jpegs, for example, are so ubiquitous that I find it extremely unlikely that any future computers wouldn't be able to decode them, even if we move to different image compression formats. We're at the beginning of the digital age, it's not going to be a case of throwing out your old VHS tapes.

 

[Itisnotlogical]

I'm excited about this thread! I love photography, I'm hoping to be a photojournalist for a career (but only because I wouldn't leave my paycheck to the random number god of selling photo-art prints). I'm interested to see what these photos are, just because of the mystery of never understanding the context.

 

[Kestra]

So I'm not going to post all the pics, but I thought you guys might be curious about what was on there! Here are two of them. Horrible quality, but good memories!

 

[Amaris]

Yay!

 

[Mr Awe]

Cool! I'm glad they turned out ok. Thanks for posting the pics, I know we were all curious!

Mr Awe

 

[Tora Ziyal]

Wonderful!