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Tag Archives: digitization
Modern Movie Consumption 2
When I first started writing this essay it was intended as a personal dig into the home entertainment industry that, through technological progress, rendered my humble DVD collection worthless and made consumers either re-purchase or abandon their home movie collection. As it turns out, that’s not quite the case. Consumers are overwhelmed with options. It’s not a battle between streaming vs. physical. We’ve almost reached a point where it’s possible to casually view a movie via streaming services, pay for it on video-on-demand, borrow it from a library, hunt down copies on physical media (new or used), and, for die hard fans and collectors, pre-order and invest in elaborate box set or steelbook editions by boutique labels. Everyone’s catered for. Continue reading
Posted in Media, Movies
Tagged 4K, BD, betrayal, blu-ray, censorship, collecting, collections, commerce, consumerism, digitization, disposability, DVD, greed, home entertainment, media player, movies, Netflix, optical media, packaging, physical media, spirits in the material world, streaming, throwaway society, UHD
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The quality of slide scans
Photo slides had completely disappeared off my radar until early 2008 when my father brought them over — along with a slide scanner he couldn’t figure out how to operate. I knew that someday I would revisit them with my trusty old Epson Perfection 3490 Photo flatbed scanner. What follows are my thoughts and experiences on the matter. Brace for impact! Continue reading
Posted in Photography
Tagged advice, archival, digitization, digitizing old photos, experiences, history, memories, personal, projects, scanning, time
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Photo restoration through AI? Nope!
Despite the recent incredible developments in artificial intelligence and image generation, I remain steadfast that AI still has no role in the workflow for digitising personal snapshots on prints, slides or negatives. While I obviously made basic edits like cropping, or adjusting brightness, contrast, white balance and colours so that the viewer can actually see what’s going on in a photo, my experiences with AI services (read: face enhancing) have done nothing but confirm a phenomenon that’s already been termed “identity shift”. Continue reading
Posted in Photography
Tagged AI, AI photo enhancement, archival, art, digitization, facial recognition, man-machine, memories, restoration, surveillance
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AI Photo Enhancement: Boon or Bust for Old Photos?
Digitizing old family photos is a great way to preserve family history and memories for future generations. But let’s face it: old photos can be faded, scratched, and just plain old-looking. That’s where AI-powered photo enhancement software comes in. But is it really the panacea it’s cracked up to be? Continue reading
Posted in Technology
Tagged AI, AI and photo authenticity, AI image editing, AI photo enhancement, authenticity in photo restoration, ChatGPT, digitization, digitizing old photos, images, photo enhancement ethics, photo enhancement software, photo restoration techniques, photography, photos, preservation, preserving old photos, restoring historical photos, Skynet
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Current status: Still sorting photos
It’s March 2023, and it’s been about one year since I started digitising my photo collection. What I hadn’t counted on was the amount of time that researching, naming, and sorting of the resultant scans would ultimately take. Continue reading
Posted in Photography
Tagged digitization, history, images, memories, personal, photos, puppies, time
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Photography: What’s the point?
The photo fails as a historic document. It has no journalistic value or artistic merit. It is neither aesthetic nor is there an underlying message. While there is no doubt that it meant something to whoever pressed the shutter at that moment, this information is now, some forty years later, lost. Continue reading
Posted in Photography
Tagged digitization, history, images, memories, nostalgia, personal, philosophy, purpose of meaning
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The obsolescence of family photo albums
Ah, the family photo albums! Those archivists of activities, those precious nuggets of nostalgia, those reminders of bad haircuts and even worse fashion sense that were cause for much delight when the parents had visitors over and they all gushed over pictures of babies of strangers whom they’ve never met and places nobody barely remembers. Family photos cover the spectrum from braggery from the curator’s perspective to voyeurism on the viewer’s part. Continue reading
Posted in Photography
Tagged digitization, images, memories, mortality, nostalgia, people, personal
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