Is It Store Or Shop?

Is Camera Electronic a store or a shop? Yes. Both. Two shops that store all sorts of photographic gear and shop staff that store all sorts of photographic knowledge. Even the writer of the shop weblog column knows how many beans make five. It's six, but you can go onto your computer and claim a bean-back... For the newly-analogue worker the question of shopping and storage comes up in a different way to that of the digital shooter: a. You need film more than you need electricity. The digital shooter can get juice from every mains socket or computer USB port. You can only get film at retail outlets. And you can only shoot as many pictures as you have film. So buy more than you think you need. Take a hint from the CE film fridge and store the film in your own fridge. A sealed tupperware box in the fridge keeps most films happy for year, and that same sealed container in a freezer will keep them for a decade. Thaw out and warm up before shooting, of course. Taking your film safely on a trip is more problematical than doing the same with a memory card. Beware x-ray machines, heat, humidity, fungus, bugs, and the price of coffee at the airport. If you're travelling hard, see CE for a Pelican case to protect the gear and the film stock. b. You still need electricity. Probably not as much and possibly not in rechargeable lithium-ion form. But a lot of the 60's to 90's cameras carried one-use Li-ion batteries for meters and film transport mechanisms. Call in at CE and buy some. c. You need negative or slide storage. Even if you elect to have your analogue results scanned and fed into your digital workflow, you will want to keep the negs and slides - even if someone tells you to ditch them. They are the RAW file for your system that mechanically restores what you did when your expensive hard drive fails. Negatives go into plastic negative pages that you buy in dozens from CE. The plastic is one that does not degrade over time or weep into the negative. You can do the same with paper negative storage pages but they grow brittle fast. Slides in unmounted form are treated the same way as the b/w negatives. If they are in 2 x 2 cardboard or plastic slide mounts they can drop into pages that either fill loose-leaf binders or sit as suspension files. Be aware that a lot of these suspension files make for a very heavy weight and a filing cabinet is needed. Cool, dry conditions, of course. The images that are in the digital stream are as safe or as exposed as your own system has been structured for, and will be backed up or lost accordingly. The surest way of backing up any really good and profitable commercial image is to publish it on the internet and allow it to be stolen by other photographers. You may be then assured that it will exist forever being stolen and restolen. Eventually your minutely-detailed 80 Gb image will be reduced through jpeg copying to four pixels and become an icon of modern art. Watermark those pixels.