Hi tacit!
You don't even have to be a super pro to get shots like Bann's. Here's
night shot that I took with my new Canon EOS 6D, looking out of a hotel window in NYC at 3:00 AM. What's amazing about it is that I took the photo with the camera set on
automatic and didn't even use a tripod! There are some things about the camera that I'm not so happy about, but you are absolutely right about the astonishing low light performance.
I worry less about the permanence of digital storage, which can always be serially transferred to new media, than about the longevity of printed photographic output. As you note, black & white film based pix hold up for extended periods of time, but color photos will fade pretty fast unless protected, a problem whenever you introduce pigments (in lieu of chemical reactions?) I suppose, whether in film or digital output. It's been especially, and hugely, problematic when it comes to stable paper/ink combinations for digital output, though, although they've made a whole lot of headway. The folks at
Wilhelm Imaging have been plugging away on this subject since forever ago. I notice they reference the Corbis underground
Sub-Zero Preservation Facility with which I was unfamiliar. Of course, if you've got the digital file, you can always print out another copy, but it's amazing how big a difference even the most minor change in paper, printer, or color management can make. It's sort of ironic because there have never been as many options (& variables) in potential colorants and substrates etc., including the ease of home printing, yet more and more photo viewing seems to be inexorably migrating to the web.
On the other hand, every embarrassing thing you've ever done online is preserved forever, so there's that. In any case, I think we may be saving, not losing, way too much stuff. The biggest problem will be extracting useable needles from those mountains of haystacks. After I pass, my kids are a lot more likely just to wipe my disks, drives and devices and shunt them off to some needy organization. Aside from presumably being dead, I could hardly blame them for that, when even I don't want to spend my time culling my files.
