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| My mother-in-law, Hazel E. Tripp, yesterday celebrating her 93rd birthday! (click to enlarge) Since March 1st of this year she has fractured her left hip twice (inserted a rod and then a total hip replacement) but still is going strong! I could only hope I'm as mentally and physically sharp as she is when I get to 83, let alone trying to reach 93. She isn't ready to reach home plate yet (see below for an explanation). She is one terrific human being and I'm really lucky to have her as my mother-in-law. Fujifilm X-T2, 23mm f/1.4 lens 1/35th sec. @ f/5.6; ISO 800 |
I'm sure, for most of you reading this blog, you are young or in middle age and dying doesn't often enter your thoughts or your routine conversations. With my 2 friends, ages 81 and 67, as well as me, age 65, dying does cross one's mind on occasion especially since we see obituaries published daily of individuals much younger than us. That does tend to work on you after a while. When you are in your 60s you are at an age that you realize much more of your life is now behind you than before you. I'm a lifelong baseball fan and I like to tell people that in the baseball gave of life, I've rounded third and am on the way home. My plan is to slide in to home safely! My advice is for you to enjoy running those bases while you can because you never know when you'll get called out! But I digress.
Our conversation meandered around for a while but honed in on what value will your spouse, children or family give to your lifetime passion of creating images. You know, all those images that you spent much of your life and disposable income making as well as so carefully back up so they aren't lost will be on your computer after you die. What value do you think your family will give to them and what will they do with them?
One friend said his son would probably pick out one image he likes and discard all the rest. I thought my family would want to keep the thousands of images I made of my children, family events, etc. that I have made over the past many years. I'm not sure what they will do with them, but I think those are the only ones my family will care about. I don't think they will give a damn about Yellowstone, other national parks, my steam locomotive images, fall foliage in New England and all the rest of the stuff I've created, currently about 135,000 images, in my Lightroom catalog. I don't think they would even look at them.
The fact that they would only be interested in the family photos revealed another issue to me. How will they get into my password protected computer and how will they be able to open the images to see them? Most of my family photos are in the RAW format. Some are JPEGs, but most are RAW. How in the world will they open those photos unless they have a RAW converter? They won't be able to unless a) I leave them my password and b) the images are in a format they can open.
That second point is why I developed a plan for this winter when it is really not conducive to go out and photograph as much as when the scenery and weather is better. Since I have two adult children, my plan is to purchase two external hard drives with sufficient capacity, one to give to each of them. Then over the winter months I will go through all the family photographs, keeping the same easy to understand file system I have developed (which is by each of their names as well as their children's names as sub-folders) and events, then convert all of the images to high quality JPEGs. When my time comes, there should the be a complete copy of all family photos for each of them. This can't be a one time effort as I will be making more family photos so I will add those images to each hard drive as time passes.
The benefit of this little endeavor will be that, upon my death, each of my children, as well as their children, will have a complete copy of all of the family photos, which by the way, include digitized images of me and my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents as well.
What will be the legacy of your life's photographic work? What are you doing now to ensure those valuable images will be available to members of your family? You really should think about this. You may be gone, but they will be the ones who can't get to your images and will be saddened by that fact. Just how close are you to home plate? LOL
Thanks for looking. Enjoy!
Dennis A. Mook
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I have no great insights to share, but I do share your concern. I'm 72 and my LR library contains about 140000 images, including about 1700 I added last week on a family cruise in SE Alaska. I've tried to be systematic about file structure, key words, captions, backups, etc. if I did nothing else for the next year, however, I don't think I could bring my system anywhere close to complete. I do think text is an important component and have tried to keep an up-to-date narrative account of my collection. The more information associated with a collection, the more likely some geeky great grandchild will care enough to keep it alive. Scanned family photos dating to the 1800s from various sides of the family are an important part of the collection -- I sometimes find myself looking at some of the faces in those images with the realization that I'm the only living person who can identify them. I have a proliferation of hard drives scattered in various locations, including with my kids. I don't worry much about jpeg vs. raw, though others have told me I should. I guess I'm figuring if the thing gets buried long enough for raw conversion to be an issue, the game is already lost.
ReplyDeleteHal, thank you for your comment. You seem to be in a very similar situation to me. I've tried to get both of my children interested in photography, thus ensuring my images will at least have an advocate for saving them down the road. However, neither have any interest other than using their phones to photograph their children.
DeleteIn the end, I guess it won't matter as I won't be around. The only thing I can do is make my images available and let them know know how much my photography has meant to me and let it go from there.
Dennis
ReplyDeleteA lovely photograph and sentiment relating to a lady whom you clearly appreciate. As I know personally, it is a privilege to be able to share with such a venerable family member.
I enjoy your posts, particularly regarding use of the Fuji X system and your dedication to producing quality images. I note in this article that you have digitised your family film images. This is a project I hesitate to begin for my own photos (slides, negatives and prints). I have read about different approaches (various scanners, use of cameras to copy, software options) and their attendant limitations and complications. It seems to be far from straight forward. I do not want to start down the wrong path, resulting in poor conversions. I wondered whether you would share your approach. I feel sure with your methodical approach to the production of immaculate photographs that you will have developed techniques and processes that produces excellent results. Thanks.
Alan, thank you for your kind words. You certainly paid me some very nice compliments and I a, appreciative. Frankly, I went through several hundred slides and pages of negatives, picked out the family photos that I wanted to digitize, then sent them off to Scan Cafe. Paying a nominal sum made much more sense to me than spending hundreds of hours picking images, carefully cleaning each one, scanning them and then editing the scans. I found the high quality option provided by Scan Cafe met my standards.
DeleteThank you Dennis. That is a pragmatic approach, which I may adopt for important images. I will have to find a good firm in the UK.
DeleteDennis,
ReplyDeleteThis same issue has crossed my mind a few times (I'm 72) and I can't think of a relative that would care to take over my digital images. I believe all those backups and systematic file layouts are only for my convenience and peace of mind and not for a future caretaker. But, I do believe that some of those images pulled off those disks and printed will at least have a physical presence after I'm out of the picture. Even if they get stuffed in a box and put in a closet there is a good chance that they will be viewed in the future and possibly bring back some memories and joy to the viewer. What are the odds that someone coming across my disks in the future will take the time (provided the hardware exists) to cull through my work? I still get a kick out of viewing old prints even though I'm fully immersed in the digital world today. Hopefully others will also.
John E.
John, thanks for the comment. You make an excellent point. I cannot disagree with anything you have said.
DeletePrints, including photo books, are certainly part of the answer, especially from a family heritage standpoint, especially if there is a lot of annotation--identities, dates, circumstances. But to pass on the legacy of a photographer digitization coupled with narrative is vital. I, too, used ScanCafe to digitize all my negatives and slides. I weighed the approach of selecting the best images to digitize and using the high quality option, but in the end sent everything to ScanCafe in a number of batches and mostly used the less expensive standard option. It would have been cheaper being more selective and the results would have been better scans, but the time involved was prohibitive. Preserving the legacy ultimately requires finding a custodian in the next generation or two who has the skill and interest to at least do no harm. Ironically, the odds of someone coming along who really wants to build on what you've done increase with each passing generation--an intact photographic archive of a gg grandparent who died in 1920 would be a windfall of great value to me.
DeleteOne good option is to take some/all of your images and copy them onto gold-coated DVDs, which have an expected lifespan of 200 years. Put one in your safety deposit box with instructions a/or a curse against destruction. :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for another suggestion. However, I don't think my children even own a DVD player in any of their computers any longer. Everything is downloaded or streamed directly from the Internet. I still have some files on a 3 1/2" floppy disk and no way to read them! Changing technologies can be an issue.
DeleteGood article Dennis, and one I've thought about more recently. I've no dependents so maybe it won't even matter that much.
ReplyDeleteIn baseball parlance, I feel like I'm caught in a rundown trying to stretch a double into a triple, and hopefully I won't be making the first out of the inning on poor baserunning (which as you know is a big no-no in baseball).
Regards, Jim
Just don't cause a double play! Thanks for the comment Jim.
ReplyDelete