High-tech, high-touch: Back to the future

While fetching my digital camera from the repair shop, I noted a bunch of clunky old film cameras and their flashes lining a back table. I thought no one used film anymore. Wrong.

The proprietor explained that a growing subset of young people like to work with old-fashioned film technology. Here are kids who computed by the time they crawled, and they're hanging out in darkrooms with negatives and vats of chemicals.

In his 1982 bestseller "Megatrends," John Naisbitt predicted this kind of thing. The more high-tech there is, he wrote, the greater the need for the antidote of "high-touch." He said, "We must learn to balance the material wonders of technology with the spiritual demands of our human nature."

Naisbitt sure got that right. Today's tech giants bear touchy-feely names like Google, Twitter and Apple. Meanwhile, very high-touch women's cosmetics — basically paint applied by hand — tout their complexity. For example, Estee Lauder's Idealist Even Skintone Illuminator advertises "Triple-Optic Technology."

As for the cameras, "there are hipsters in Brooklyn that are dedicated to old films and old processes," Steve Smith, head of the Rhode Island School of Design's photography department, told me. "Those people are true sentimentalists."

Professionals generally work with digital but might switch to film only for large formats, Smith said. However, "there's a huge waiting list" for the Fujifilm FinePix X100, a new camera that combines the two technologies and partly resembles the classically retro Leica.

The renewed enthusiasm for film cameras is part of the larger Slow Movement, which seems to have begun with food in Europe. "Slow Food" is an effort to preserve local varieties of chickens, apples, artisan cheeses and other edibles against the onslaught of multinational agribusinesses selling homogenized products grown and processed to travel enormous distances. The related "locavore movement" encourages consumers to eat locally produced, organic foods.

Look at the popularity of the back-to-the-'50s simple commuter bicycles. Look at the very successful Etsy.com website, on which people can sell their hand-knitted sweaters, homemade jewelry and other crafts.

As corporate consultant Naisbitt wrote decades ago, we want "soft-edges balancing the hard edges of technology."

High-touch married to technology can make big money: Started by a frustrated woodworker, Etsy is now a private business valued at $100 million.

Photo Pages | PHOTO IMAGES

If you’ve committed to interviewing a loved one, doing genealogy research, and in general deepening your family bonds, chances are you are wondering what to do about the hundred or sometimes thousands of photographs you or your parents have lying around unorganized in boxes or albums.  Most people have the best intentions for their family photos, but most photos still end up in bad situations for most of their lives. Even when photos are organized, photo albums are often the culprit: placing photos in contact with plastic sheets that break down and release photo-destroying chemicals, sticky sheets that permanently glue and warp photos with heat and humidity changes. Even nicer photo albums with glassine sheets between the pages can break down photos. And then they spend years in attics and basements exposed to heat, cold, high humidity, mold, and flooding. Many are not even labeled.

The good news is that you can change this and preserve your family photographs with a little organized effort. Museum-quality archival products are now available for the same amount of money you could spend on non- Archival Storage boxes and albums, and many companies makes boxes, binders, folders, and albums for every kind of photo, newspaper clipping, diploma, and pamphlet you have. Before you decide which archival products you may need, you need to consider what you want to save.

Consider a Photo Album that your grandmother put together. The pages are falling out of the binding and it is too fragile to handle without damaging it further, but when you open it you see her hand-written notes and labels on the page next to the photographs. She placed the photos in this order and knowing that imbues it with a meaning beyond the photographs alone. How you want to preserve the order and care that your grandmother put into the album, along with the photographs, will guide your decision on how to store it.

If you decide that you want the photographs to be as accessible as possible, and you accept some loss from the original album, then you can carefully remove the pages from the album, and the photos from the pages, and place the photos in an Archival Album binder in polypropylene sheets to preserve the photos, and the paper with labels and notes, in acid-free housing. This allows the photos to be viewed easily. In this new housing, you can still preserve the order and labeling of the original album, but it will lose some qualities of the original.

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