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It's Capa's Birthday
The legendary war photographer Robert Capa, whose birth name was Endre Friedmann, was born in Budapest, Hungary on October 22, 1913.
At the young age of 18, he fled the country after being arrested for his political activities against the government. He went to Berlin where he became involved in photojournalism and landed his first big scoop taking photographs of Leon Trotsky. With the rise of Nazism, Capa moved to Paris to escape persecution. There he became notorious as Robert Capa. During the following 20 years, determined to fight totalitarianism with cameras, Capa covered all the wars of his time. It was covering the Spanish Civil War, where he took the controversial picture that made him famous - a dying soldier falling from the impact of a bullet. Covering wars made him famous, but also brought about his early death. On May 25, 1954 Robert Capa died when he stepped on a land mine on a battlefield in Indochina. |
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I've digitized my photos. Can I throw out my original film and prints? 
Once your collection is digitized, you can access it easily and, more important, safely. A clear advantage to digitizing your photo collection is that you no longer have to physically handle the originals. You can view, share, and make hard copies of your images without risking fingerprints, tears, or accidental bending of the prints.
But electronic files are by no means a replacement for originals. Electronic data can be easily lost through physical damage to the storage media (e.g. CD, DVD, flash drive). A simple scratch on a disk can result in the loss of many pictures. Even if you take very good care of the storage media for your digital files, the rapid progress of hardware and software technology can make your pictures difficult or even impossible to retrieve in the future. And even if you believe you can keep up with the evolving technology by routinely updating your files, consider this: the original photograph-the actual object-has a history and a quality that can never be wholly translated to electronic data. So don't throw out your original film and prints!
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Tips & Tricks
Away from Kitchens and Baths
The best way to extend the life of your photos is to reduce the storage temperature and humidity. The simplest way to do this is to find the area in your house that is naturally cooler and drier than the rest of the house. Many people already know that their photos should not be stored in the attic or in the basement. But did you know that even in the living areas there are warmer and cooler areas as well as drier and  wetter areas? Keep your photos and other heirlooms out of the kitchen and out of bathrooms with showers and tubs. The humidity in these rooms can be much higher than in the rest of the house. It may also be a good idea to keep your photos out of closets that share a wall with the kitchen or bathroom as moisture can migrate through many types of wallboard. Besides having higher humidity, kitchens also can be fairly warm when the stove is going. And finally, avoid storing or displaying your pictures near or above sources of heat such as radiators or heating vents. Remember: If it's humid or hot, it's not a good spot! |
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Terms of the Month
JPEG (.jpg) - A standard data compression method for bitmapped images. JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the name of the committee that created the standard. This method is lossy.
TIFF (.tif) - The standard lossless file format for bitmapped images. TIFF stands for tagged image file format.
Archival Advisor Glossary | |
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