Photos, film, and their death

There's been a lot of coverage in the press here about the forthcoming death of film. This has, in particular been prompted by the latest exhibition at the Tate Modern main hall where  Tacita Dean has an exhibition shot on 35mm film.
Sort of a last homage to physical film.
Dean even ran into problems getting the film cut properly, as the Dutch lab being used to process the film couldn't manage it - and another specialist had to be called in.
Article on this.

It is an area I've got a bit of experience in. And generally, I'm fine with film dying. When I was taking pictures of chromosomes, the quality of digital photographs wasn't good enough - and the heath robinson approach to attaching a camera to a microscope didn't help. For that reason I took most of my early-mid period chromosome pictures using B/W film. That also meant I could develop each negative to focus on specific aspects of the picture.
After developing the negative, I'd scan it in at 1500dpi and work in photoshop to karyotype or whatever. This did seem to be duplication of work, but the system worked ok for me.

As digital cameras, and attachments for microscopes, improved, I switched to taking the pictures on an 8-10MP camera which seemed to do the job to a reasonable standard.

So from that perspective I can completely understand why film would die. Sure it's sad, but in terms of resolution, cost, speed etc surely digital wins out.

The downside is storage. As it is with most digital formats. Film, although it degrades and gets scratches etc exists for a long time, in the same format (however format shifting film could be a great b-grade movie). Digital however, can be saved in a multitude of formats, and there's no standard on how to change the format as they change. For example, I've got very old images stored as JPG, which although readable, are of poor quality compared to my more recent hi-res TIFF, but what happens if I'd left this on floppy disk, or other pointless media? Could I still read them? Most of mine are on DVD or sitting on the server. But at some point I'm confident they'll reach a stage where I can no longer read them.

Blogs will soon follow concerning my bike ride (promise!) and our whisky show, which involved um extensive tasting. Brilliant!

me