Photo Shoot: Digital de-cluttering

“The memory on this device is full.”

Those seven words strung together send terror into the minds of any technology user in 2022, Moore’s Law in action. Named for Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, his famous law, “the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every two years.” That prediction was made back in 1965.

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When the first digital cameras at the Cape Cod Times arrived, the Kodak DCS 620, they came equipped with two PC memory cards, each capable of holding 125 megabytes. The image size of each photograph was 2 megapixels.

This was all amazing tech when each Times photographer got a pair of these, selling for a whopping $9,999 each. The batteries were the size of a full-size candy bar and gave out in about 30 minutes of freezing temperatures, but we were in photo heaven.

From film to megapixels

Before those cameras it was a hybrid system, shoot color negative film, process for 22 minutes and then use a film scanner to “digitize” the photograph. Those new cameras closed the venerable old darkroom whose chemical-stained walls were torn down to make more space for computer work stations.

Those first cameras were soon outdated by Mr. Moore’s law. Bigger and bigger chip sizes in smaller and smaller camera bodies. The up-to-date photojournalist in 2022 is now shouldering a mirrorless camera with top-of-the-line models sporting a 52-megapixel chip and can blast off 20 frames per second and it will only set the buyer back about $5,500.

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Search digital archives for the past

Which brings us back to the memory full problem. We are drowning in a sea of megapixels. Preparing for a photography talk last week that required a lot of old images from the film days through to the present I quickly encountered a dead zone.

The old transparencies and negatives were accessible, either in film sleeves or slide mounts, usually filed by assignment date. But starting in late 1999 for a few years, there was a black hole.

Then the digital archive system arrived, appropriately named after a magician, “Merlin” and now a few key words typed into the program and voilà everything shows up, no looking through three-ring binders of slides or dusty old boxes in the Cape Cod Times basement.

But for this old-timer, there is still some magic in going through old slides, a trip down memory lane, especially finding a gem like my favorite football shot of all time, a field goal to remember.

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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Photo Shoot: Digital de-cluttering