Smithsonian's photography chief on the digital revolution

What’s the future for digital photography? According to Carl Hansen, the acting director of Smithsonian Photographic Services, “in five years the only people shooting film will be artists and purists.”

Hansen, who got his start as a US Army photographer in Viet Nam, spent six and one-half years heading the photography department at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute here in Panama and worked as a photojournalist for a couple of newspapers, came back to the isthmus “to improve the relationship between Smithsonian Photographic Services and STRI,” and while here found the time to speak at the institute’s science lecture series on April 6. The subject of his talk was the history of digital photography at the Smithsonian, but as that US institution has been at the cutting edge of photography just about since the camera was invented, it was really a primer on the development of digital photography in general.

The Smithsonian began its involvement with digital photography back in the early 1980s, and in 1986, with an Amiga computer, Hansen did some of the first digital imaging here.

(These days Hansen is mostly an administrator, one who often has to set aside his instincts as a here-and-now news photographer and look at his field of expertise from the archivist’s point of view. But if you care to see just a tiny sampler of the pictures he has taken, visit http://photo2.si.edu/different/dif_csnake.html and http://photo2.si.edu/eclipse/eclipse.html.)

Hansen points to 1990 as a watershed year in the development of digital photography. First, there was the release of Adobe’s first version of the Photoshop computer graphics program, “a great breakthrough.” That was also the year that NASA launched the Hubble Telescope, which has revolutionized astronomy with its digital images of deep space. Also in 1990, Kodak released the DCS 100, the first professional level digital camera.

That was a bulky contraption, of which only 400 were made. It sold for $30,000, which Hansen says is the approximate price of each new device at the cutting edge of digital photography.

In 1992 came the more wieldy Kodak DCS 200, and the Sony Pro Mavica, which was the first digital camera to use a floppy disk. The next year came the first Internet browser, which of course was a necessary prelude to widespread public access to online digital archives.

In 1994, Nikon and Fuji teamed up to produce the E2, the first full-frame digital SLR camera. That year Kodak released the 1.5-megapixel (MP) DCS 420, at a price of $11,000, and the first compact photographic flash card became available. For specialized museum work, the Dicomed high-resolution scan back, a 45-MP device that cost $39,000 in its color version and took 15 minutes to do a scan, appeared on the market. At the same time QuickTime and QT 3d photography and computer programs appeared, so “we could get things to rotate, and do panoramas and all that kind of stuff.”

Throughout the latter half of the 90s digital cameras got smaller, cheaper and faster, and capable of taking higher resolution images. The Smithsonian was a good place to watch these developments, because camera manufacturers would bring their prototypes to the institution for testing and in hopes that sales would be made.

And so it was that when Fuji and Nikon went their separate digital ways in 2002, both paths led through the Smithsonian. In that year Nikon came out with its six-MP D100 ($2000) and Fuji with its 6.2-MP S2 ($2,400). “I was heavily involved in the beta testing of both of these cameras,” Hansen explained.

The Smithsonian made a major commitment to the S2, because Hansen and his colleagues found that the Nikon’s computer chip wasn’t as good as Fuji’s, and thus the S2’s pictures turned out sharper.

(A major factor in the institution’s photographic purchasing decisions has to do with lenses. “The Smithsonian is heavily invested in Nikon lenses,” Hansen explained, and thus they want to buy cameras that can use those lenses.)

Last year Kodak released the 14n, the first full-frame, high-resolution digital camera, which sells for about $5,000. Meanwhile Canon teamed up with Phase One to get the better digital software technology they needed to remain in the competition. This year, “we got an explosion of 8 megapixel professional and prosumer cameras.”

Now, Hansen says, “there are some incredible cameras out there.”

How good are they?

“Digital is getting so much better than film that we’re finding out how bad our lenses are.”

So what does Hansen find exciting at the moment? He showed the Imacon I-Express 64-MP camera back, a $23,000 device that gives “true color for every pixel.” He likes the 11.5-MP Digiflex, which uses Nikon lenses. He’s impressed with the 25-MP Phase One. He noted a new camera back from Microptics, which allows for excellent digital pictures of insects and other tiny subjects.

For museum work, Hansen likes the 360-MP, $150,000 Jumbo Scan, which is a single-shot camera that doesn’t expose objects to potentially destructive excess light and ultraviolet rays. Because this camera can scan in infrared, ultraviolet and other visible or invisible parts of the light band, it has proven useful in the dating of paintings, as pigments commonly used in different times and places that may appear the same to the naked eye will show their differences when scanned under various light frequencies.

From a news photographer’s perspective, all of this is wonderful. But maybe not from an archivist’s point of view.

“We know that we can take a 100-year-old film negative and print a picture with it, but we don’t know that about digital,” Hansen explained. We know how to preserve old film, but computer files, CD-ROMs, floppy disks and the rest are too new for such an historical perspective. It’s a big deal for the Smithsonian, which has one of the world’s great photographic archives.

“It’s a massive problem,” he said, one that the Smithsonian is trying to address by “going full bore at a digital asset management program.” Part of the trouble is that even seasoned professional photographers often don’t know what a high-resolution digital storage system is, or how much labor it takes to build and maintain such an archive.

One of the things that they have learned is that at the resolutions the Smithsonian uses the raw format --- rather than JPEG --- is “the way you should be saving stuff.”

Looking at one of the US government’s other great digital photographic archives, the one maintained by NASA, Hansen notes the space agency’s experience of a loss rate of about one percent in its electronic archives. “That’s the argument in favor of film,” he concluded.

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Smithsonian's photo chief talks digital history, future

science

The past, present and future of digital photography, from one who ought to know