Memories are not made of these

A young woman edges along a pohutukawa limb, hair tossed against the backdrop of a stormy beach, while her boyfriend captures the moment on his new digital camera. A baby is propped on Santa's knee for the first time as her mother frames the pair in her camera phone. A drunken New Year's Eve pose, suitably out of focus, is beamed around the world.

New Zealanders have taken more pictures than ever these holidays. Digital technology has made it easy for avaricious adopters - people who embrace new technology quickly as opposed to adapters who get around to it in time - to be amateur photographers.

But how many of these images will be around to stir memories, or make subjects cringe, decades from now? Most will long ago have been deleted. Others that made it to print will be barely recognisable.

Statistics NZ says a record 57,000 digital cameras came into the country in November, 18,000 more than a year ago. Even more camera phones may have been sold, if international trends are a guide. The 70 million cellphone cameras bought in 2003 outnumbered digital-camera sales.

But digital technology has yet to come up with a tool as convenient and dependable as the photo album for retaining our memories. It takes considerable time, effort and technology for home-computer users to extract good-quality, lasting prints. Instead, we hit delete.

The early years of digital photography may well be distinguished by a black hole of images to look back on. "I've no doubt there are going to be blindspots in the pictorial memory of the early digital era," says Mark Strange, senior conservator of photographs at the Alexander Turnbull Library.

Strange says domestic collections are an important source for the library and provide a rich vein for historians, social researchers and genealogists. But home storage of digital images is complex and there are issues around quality and longevity.

"There's no digital equivalent of the shoebox in the wardrobe," says Strange. "People think it's wonderful when they get a new camera or compact flash card which holds 460 megabytes. They don't realise they are on a moving platform - they have to be more active to keep up and maintain their collection. There wouldn't be many amateur photographers who are assiduously backing up their images or migrating them from one format to another."

However simple camera manufacturers and retailers make it sound, downloading to a computer takes time and effort. The complexities of digital-imaging software, colour balancing, printer profiling and obtaining quality printing paper are generally lost on those lured by the ease of a point-and-shoot.

"You hear of people with 6000 images on their computer," says Wayne Sheppard, owner of downtown Auckland photolab Fast Finish.

"The computer goes down and the whole family history disappears. But it's a monumental task to print that many pictures."

Many don't even get as far as the computer. "They don't know how to edit them on computer so they hit the delete button on their camera.

"We do get people coming in with 300 images on their cameras."

Sheppard has seen the film-processing side of his business halve in the past year, such is the impact of digital cameras and camera phones. Film-manufacturing giants like Kodak have shed thousands of jobs worldwide, and he mutters darkly about technology leading consumers by the nose. "Young people especially must have their gadgets."

There is resistance, he says, mainly from the over-30s "who have seen what you can get from film". But there's no sign yet of a mass move back to 35mm film, despite the latest cameras being both digital and film-capable.

David Langman, director of the New Zealand Centre for Photography, says the onus is on buyers to become more computer-literate and digital image-conscious. "If you have to sit there and print out images from your computer it's going to require a lot of time and ink and paper. So people make choices about what images are important. But how do they know what's important?"

As a telling example, he cites former US President Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. "When the scandal broke, the only photographer who could come up with anything was using film. Everyone else was using digital and had deleted the relevant images.

"We are probably not going to have the same history that we have had. Traditional film offers a lot of advantages for historians, social scientists and the news media."

Of course, with money, time and effort, budding Anne Geddes and Robin Morrisons can turn their home office into photographic studios, using the latest printers, inks and archival papers. But although cameras as big as 8 megapixels are now widely available, it's still a problem getting a decent-sized print without loss of definition.

Sheppard believes it will be another decade before digital matches film for quality. "A 35mm negative has 40 megabytes of information. Your best digital camera has only about 8. Digital information has a short life, whereas film sticks around for a long time."

On a typical inkjet printer sold for home use, even prints on quality-gloss paper will last only six to eight months before deteriorating, he says.

"The biggest concern is where are those prints going to be in 20 years' time? Most of them won't be around."

He advises people to transfer their best images to a CD and take them to a photolab for chemical processing on photographic paper.

BUT even CDs carry potential for disaster. The jury is out on how long images last on CDs. File corruption, while less common than in the past, remains an issue. They are vulnerable to heat, light and moisture. And unless you're an irredeemable cataloguer, you may have no idea where to find that stored memory.

"You end up with hundreds of them lying around with no idea what's on them and every now and then you can't open them."

In any case, given the pace of technological change, some predict CDs will soon be as redundant as 8mm film, because tomorrow's computers will be unable to read the discs.

Auckland Art Gallery chief photographer John McGivor recommends the time-honoured principle of storing data in two places - not just in the hard drive but on a back-up CD or DVD. "Most people don't really go to that trouble. There are horror stories of wedding photographs taken three years ago. People come back to order reprints and find the CD is unreadable."

Some wedding photographers have divorced themselves from digital, rekindling a relationship with box cameras using medium-format film. The problem is not just the unreliability of CD storage but the time and effort spent at the computer. Far easier to hand a roll of film to a professional lab and let experts do the work.

Brian Curtis, editor of the Photographer's Mail, says the digital era has triggered professional concerns. "The quality of photographs has dropped. There's been an explosion in people calling themselves photographers and selling their images to people who don't know the difference."

But there's no sign of happy snappers clicking off the fad and the quality and megapixel capacity of cameras are rapidly improving. Global camera phone sales for 2004 were expected to top 200 million; industry leader Nokia claims they are fast overtaking digital cameras as mainstream imaging devices.

On a recent visit to a Singapore bird sanctuary, Curtis was bemused when a group of school children came into a darkened observation room. "They all pushed their point-and-shoot digitals and the whole room was glowing.

"The worst part about it is that a lot of these images will be lost. People look at the images on the back of the camera and then delete them."

But he says the issue should prove temporary. In the United States, consumers are turning away from home production and are taking their cameras or memory cards into labs to have images printed on photographic paper. Camera-makers are eager to keep up consumption, so he expects the price of memory cards to drop significantly and soon to play a similar role to a film cartridge. "You'll buy it at a supermarket, fill it up and take it to a lab for processing."

Who knows? Labs may even find a niche cataloguing this limitless new database of visual memories - blurred, dodgy and iconic.