Burn baby burn

…it’s a disco inferno!

OK, so my cheesy headline refers to a record by the Trammps that you may remember if you’re as old as me. Disco. Watch those dance steps and those flared trousers. Yeah baby!

But it also refers to the practice of burning discs. CDs or DVDs.

And discs are going the same way as disco. My MacBook does not contain a DVD drive, and soon, no devices at all will contain one. CDs and DVDs will be as obsolete as 3.5″ floppy disks, 5 1/4″ floppy disks, 8″ floppy disks, papertape, and core memory. Remember those?

Quick. Imagine that right now, this moment, that moment has come and you can no longer read CDs and DVDs. How many photos have you lost?

I hope the answer is “zero”, but I fear that the answer is “lots”. Many of you keep photo backups on disk.

Bad idea. They will become obsolete, but they will also decay and become unreadable.

And that is just one reason you should print your work. The others are in this article [click].

My recent art photo garage sale was a case in point: prints are beautiful. But they are also a way to preserve photos that would otherwise be lost. Your CDs are decaying and are becoming obsolete. Your hard disks will break: not “if” but “when”. But your prints will adorn your wall, and your photobooks will be on your bookshelf, for as long as you are there.

So please: if your photos only live on a medium that will soon be as current as clay tablets, save them to a new medium, and make prints today. That way your selfies and your works of art will all remain at your disposal.

 

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