Help! Student Research

Hi all, new user to this website so not sure if this thread will be successful.

I'm a student in my final year of study where I am studying Product Design and my final year project is self directed therefore I have to select my own topic of interest, this being photography.

What I am interested in researching is if digital cameras add less value to photographs because of the difficulties in storing photos digitally, and therefore does this have an effect on the memories and emotions that photos provide. Photographs are important in peoples emotional lives and I want know if and how the digital age of photography is affecting this.

Before digital cameras came along, people used to store their photos in shoe boxes or photo albums, often in an organized manner, but with photos being digital nowadays do people still go to the extra effort to get their photos printed and organized.

Do people prefer digital cameras and the opportunities they provide or is it better to have a physical photo to reflect upon bringing back memories?

Please feel free to comment or add your own opinion to this post as anything will be appreciated to help with my research.

If you have access to a online library of reading material, there's a piece of work either called 'snapshot' or 'snapshots' and it talks about the throw away lifestyle of digital photography (if I remember rightly.) I studied all this in my 2nd year of the photography degree. Unfortunately I cannot remember the author. Also you should be able to get hold of information such as archiving (look at a program called 'shooting the past' it was a drama on the bbc a while ago) and the idea of a photo. A photo is a physical item.3

I used to print out my photos but laziness and cost got the better of me. I love shooting film and love developing in the darkroom because I enjoy the feeling of seeing the photo develop and having the physical item there...plus i like the smell of the chemicals.

My 3rd year is going to test me with this one - we have an exhibition - our final major project in year 3 and I firmly believe a photo should be a physical item, but people do test the 'boundries' of what a photo is, some display on a rolling slideshow on a mac, or enlarged on a wall.

If I have a photo I treasure it is printed in someway - paper, canvas etc...

First off Digital cameras make life easier than ever before.

An organised person will also organise his photographs. One who is not will take the shoe box approach and just save to their hard disk or the odd CD. In time these will fail and memories will be lost.

Old prints fade and get damaged, but they usually survive to the next generation at least.

The problem with photo organising programs is that they seem to be overtaken by software changes and lose their support.
I use IView which was taken over by microsoft and is no longer supported.

There needs to be an industry standard tagging system that is application independant.

Few photographs were ever Printed for display, and it is just as easy to do so today if not easier, from digital originals.

Potentially is is easier to archive and find photographs today than ever before, However it might be at least another generation before this becomes either simple enough or seen as worthwhile by most users.

Until Photographs can be geotagged automatically in camera and verbally tagged, with voice recognition either when taken or as a separate function at any later stage, Positively Identifying photographs will remain a time consuming problem. and probably not done.
These things complete with the details of the photographer should be saved along with the exif data of each photograph.

One problem I have found with personal photographs, taken over a long life, is not that they do not hold priceless memories; but that they tend to have little or no meaning to any one else.
When the who, why, when and what are not known or remembered, they lose most of their value.

Most of the multi millions of photographs taken each year, are seen by no one except the photographer. Only a tiny fraction of those survive more than a few months.

squizza said:

If you have access to a online library of reading material, there's a piece of work either called 'snapshot' or 'snapshots' and it talks about the throw away lifestyle of digital photography (if I remember rightly.) I studied all this in my 2nd year of the photography degree. Unfortunately I cannot remember the author. Also you should be able to get hold of information such as archiving (look at a program called 'shooting the past' it was a drama on the bbc a while ago) and the idea of a photo. A photo is a physical item.3

I used to print out my photos but laziness and cost got the better of me. I love shooting film and love developing in the darkroom because I enjoy the feeling of seeing the photo develop and having the physical item there...plus i like the smell of the chemicals.

My 3rd year is going to test me with this one - we have an exhibition - our final major project in year 3 and I firmly believe a photo should be a physical item, but people do test the 'boundries' of what a photo is, some display on a rolling slideshow on a mac, or enlarged on a wall.

If I have a photo I treasure it is printed in someway - paper, canvas etc...

Click to expand...

Some forms of photography will probably never have a physical reality.
These include all forms of immersive photography like 360x180 pans.
These can now be produced (with difficulty) in 3D. But it is a Virtual Reality
that only has a digital existence.

There is no single Description of what is or is not a photograph. Not how they can be made, nor how they can be percieved.

Times are changing.
Everything is digital now. A lot of people now shoot film, scan to CD, and store digitally.

Digital is just as prone to corruption as prints/negatives are. Prints and negatives can fade or get scratched or lost.

We view everything digitally. Whereas people might have hundreds of photo albums to look through, there isn't much different between flicking pages in a photo album, or pressing the 'Next' button on your dvd player remote to move to the next image.

You say photographs have lost their emotional value during the digital age and they don't have the same impact as opposed to more traditional ways of viewing photographs?

I had a party on the A-Level results day in lieu of everyone moving away to university and sort of a celebrating good results and saying good bye to my best friends.

It was a fantastic party, everyone got on fantastically, we all got a bit tipsy but nothing major. The party wound in at around 1:30am, and everyone who was left who hadn't gone home gathered around the TV in the front room. I had the TV hooked up to the Xbox, which was hooked up to a Network Storage Device that has hundreds of photographs on. We all sat on the floor/sofas/bean bags/chairs/foot-stools, all 15 of us, and looked through the photographs until 3:30am, laughing, making comments, feeling sad, feeling happy.
Not a chance you could have done that with an A4 photo album.

There are as many opinions as there are ways of making an image.
I now make a photo book of any holidays, important days etc and so can put my own words with the pictures. I don't know if this makes them any more special or important or if they will last any longer, or mean any more to the next generation, but it makes them seem more important and accessible to me. I only took up photography as a hobby 2 years ago but its already the thing which defines who I am, I may not be any good but I really enjoy trying to be.

Andy

I am curious, how will this relate to you designing a product??

Thank you all for your comments and opinions, very helpful and useful. If anyone would like to help me further with my research please send me a private messgae and I'll get back to you.
This will help me design a product because it's helping me understand users and a potential market. It will also allow me to see what needs and wants there are in the photography industry.