I've been intrigued by photography since the age of 8 when, on the occasion of a school trip to the local Zoo, my mother bought me an Instamatic camera and a roll of film.

I don't remember if it was color or black and white but the shots of those ducks and pigs (it was not much of a Zoo) were like little masterpieces to me.

Since then I have often dabbled with cameras, film, slides, dark rooms and so on.

I've even religiously read the Ansel Adams trilogy - The Camera, The Negative, The Print - trying to apply (with little success) the Zone System to 35mm B&W film.

The big problem with dark rooms was that by the time the water was at 20 degrees and everything was perfect it was time to go to sleep, so production was very scarce.

Hence I mostly used slide film... and here is problem number two: prints and negatives may fade with time but slides get moldy and covered with unerasable spots.

Back in 2008 I decided to pull out my slides to scan the best of them for conservation and, to my dismay, I found that a lot of them were unrecoverable.

I moved a few times, so did the slides, and I remember some humid storage places here and there.

As for the early prints... they got burnt in a fire in 1979!

Another drawback of photography as a hobby was that most prints and slides, no matter how good, ended up in a drawer to never be seen again.

Which raises the problem of how to archive thousands of prints and slides for easy retrieval.

And, even if they end up on a wall, give them 50 years and they'll be faded into white!

Summing it up: I was losing interest in photography and almost stopped shooting until...

The first digital backs and cameras were actually way too expensive and of very little quality but they quickly improved and now I dare anybody to say that film is better.

Maybe very large format film is still better than digital but a year 2015 400$ digital camera beats ISO 100 film 10 to 1, in my opinion.

The latest 14-bit sensors (APS-C or full frame) are amazing and, if you shooot RAW, you can pull details out of the black areas of the file that you can completely forget with film.

So.... so much for the Zone System and for spot meters: a quick look at the histogram or apply some bracketing for HDR and you are done.

The rest is done with Photoshop, which doesn't have to be at 20 degrees Celsius to work!

And, above all, digital photos don't fade, don't get eaten by mold and don't burn: as long as Jpeg and Tiff readers will be around, so will the photos.

As for retrieval, just tag them with the right words and the trick is done.

No more showing them once and then store them in a closet: with the Internet, instead, you can show your pictures to the whole world... forever!

Well, actually, "forever" as long as Flickr, Wikimedia, Instagram and so on will be around!

Again: I was kind of losing interest in photography but digital SLR, HDR, Panorama software, Photoshop and the Internet made it all come back!

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