Throwing away your negs?

[Godfrey]

While I think you should keep all your negatives/slides, I have thrown away a lot of mine. Sometimes you just need a clean cut from whatever fooling around you did back in the day. Now that I understand better how everything works; the triangle of film speed, aperture and shutter speed, I am more keen on keeping them. If anything, this is what you leave behind, a memory of you and what you saw.

If you want that "memory of you and what you saw" to be valued and seen, PUBLISH!

G

 

[semi-ambivalent]

I've been slipping in negs at the end of my printing sessions from my college days. I sent around a batch of proofsheets to a group of friends I reconnected with through FB and our reunion a few years ago. They made up a list of stuff they'd like to have, and I'm slowly getting there...

I know they're your friends but, ka-ching! 😀

s-a

 

[wrightbrain]

This archiving issue struck a chord with me a couple years ago. I was at my grandmother's house, she was going through some old pictures and pulled a negative out of an envelope of my great-grandfather, it was an odd format, maybe 127, but it would have been close to 80 years old, and it was perfect, great density and not a scratch on it.

Isn't this why we shoot film?

Godfrey is right, a digital workflow takes work and when you're gone who is going to continue that work for you? You think someone will be able to pull your hard drive out of an envelope in 80 years and get images off of it? Will USB still be around in 80 years? Will the motor on the drive spin up? Why spend the extra time, money, and effort to shoot film and then throw it away?

Someone will always be able to shine light through film and get an image.

 

[Godfrey]

This archiving issue struck a chord with me a couple years ago. I was at my grandmother's house, she was going through some old pictures and pulled a negative out of an envelope of my great-grandfather, it was an odd format, maybe 127, but it would have been close to 80 years old, and it was perfect, great density and not a scratch on it.

Isn't this why we shoot film?

Godfrey is right, a digital workflow takes work and when you're gone who is going to continue that work for you? You think someone will be able to pull your hard drive out of an envelope in 80 years and get images off of it? Will USB still be around in 80 years? Will the motor on the drive spin up? Why spend the extra time, money, and effort to shoot film and then throw it away?

Someone will always be able to shine light through film and get an image.

For the photos I value, they'll have archival prints. What's on the film is hardly what's in a print made from a negative, the rendering counts for a lot.

G

 

[John Bragg]

I have every black and white negative I have ever made kept in file sheets. I have less than a year of scanning experience but I still consider the negs dating back to 1986 as the ultimate hard copy of my work. There is no way I would part with any of them.

 

[Richard G]

I have the negatives of my first roll of film aged 12 in 1972. I have every negative of every picture since with my own cameras, except one roll I gave away. I keep them. They are all in perfect condition. They haven't taken up that much space. They are more durable than hard drives.

 

[Godfrey]

When I first burned my negatives in 1980, there were 17 30lb boxes full of them. I couldn't afford to move and store them any more. I have a smattering of old negatives from the 1980s, 1990s and into the early 2000s now. They take up six shelves in my office. When I finish scanning them all, they'll be shredded. All new negs are scanned and then shredded.

I see NO point to carting around all that perishable media. I've never lost a single digital file, negatives degrade and get lost all the time. I have every negative I've scanned and every digital image I've ever made ... they fit in a couple of terabytes of storage with room to spare and are multiply backed up.

As long as I'm around, they'll be fine. After I'm gone ... I don't care.

G

 

[JoeV]

Everybody's experience is different. My mom-in-law passed away before Christmas, and in the planning for the service it was decided that some photos of Mom would be nice to display, as a way of celebrating her life. I had made a number of candid portraits of her back in the early 1990s, using a Bronica ETRS and Tri-X. Luckily I was able to easily find them in my binder of negatives, organized by date, and had them printed 11x14 and matted to gator board.

I suppose if I had file drawers full of negatives it would be harder justifying keeping them all, but in my case it's only a handful of 3-ring binders.

~Joe

 

[mwoenv]

I keep all my negatives because occasionally I go back and look at things from years ago and print something that didn't grab me when I first developed the film - sometimes it takes time to feel something is a worthy shot.

I don't scan, except a few things to put on Flickr using an inexpensive scanner. And I don't have the really huge volume of negatives that some have.

 

[kuzano]

I won't be long now...

I won't be long now...

It won't be much longer and my final request is cremation, with boxes of negs and transparencies stacked around my body. I'm taking my memories with me.. .up in smoke!

 

[sanmich]

Never.
scan all of them, dump the contacts, organize backups, and then go there and discover the hidden pearls that you missed years ago.
style evolve..
Hard discs crash...
scanning technology advance...

You may even discover that you like wet printing one day.

 

[agianelo]

Why keep negatives or shoot raw when all you need is a 1.3MP cell phone:

http://www.imagesfrommyphonejoelgrey.com/

 

[Lawrence A.]

Properly processed negatives are much more archival than any current digital storage medium. National archives and such around the world are film recording digital photo files to save the images from the much faster deterioration of digital media. I did a job a few years back making archival fiber prints for a major national archive, because those, and the 4x5 negatives, were going to be what they stored. Scans were for rapid contemporary access. Film and prints were for permanent storage.

So I'd never throw away my negatives. Besides, I just bought a small mediium format Chromega Dichroic enlarger, so I can build and use a darkroom in the limited space I have available. The old 5x7 Elwood from the 40's wouldn't fit. I can hardly wait to start making silver prints again, which is how I made a living for 30 years.

 

[Lawrence A.]

This is plain weird Godrey you say you have lost a 'good' amount of negatives and the only reason you have them is because they are scanned.
That's not the same as I shred all my negs-which is plain daft.

I have every single neg and slide I have ever shot archived, all colour shots are pretty much as good as the day they were shot, they don't seem to degrade much.
I'm puzzled when people say negs degrade so fast, unless you are a cheap film freak there is no way they should degrade.
If the file and forget negative system is beyond you then how are you going to deal with the rigour and discipline of regular transfer and redundant media polices that are digital archiving?

Negatives don't degrade quickly if they are properly processed in the first place. If they are going to pot within 50 years, they weren't processed correctly or they weren't stored correctly, or both -- inadequate fixing , inadequate wash, storage in acid or overly humid conditions, all sorts of possiblilities, but they all point to the same fact. I've seen kodachrome from the 40's still in excellent condition. Except for endless backup, there is no such thing as an achival digital medium. Nor should anyone feel sure that the file types we are all so familiar with are going to be around when it is convenient for manufacturers to move on to something else. A digital file is at the mercy of a machine that can read the format in which it is written, and I'm not convinced that in 50 years we'll be able to read tiffs or jpegs. When they go on to something else, backward compatibility will only go so far as is convenient for the manufacturers of the technology.

That said, I blithely shoot with several digital cameras and do not film record the results. But as long as I shoot negatives, it would be foolhardy to put them in the same, tenuous place.

 

[f/14]

Negatives are not my problem, they fit into small binders and take up little of the shelf space. My main problem is the space occupied by a large number of boxes full of colour slides from the 1970's/1980's. Scanning them would take ages. Some of them might end up at the Landfill.

 

[kanzlr]

maybe a Reflecta DigiDia 6000 would help? 🙂

 

[Calzone]

Trying to describe the specifics of my system in detail is a bit over the top for the time I have at hand. But I'll give you the basis of the system:

Digital archiving is based upon three primary notions:
- duplication
- media migration
- policy

Unlike film and analog processes, you can precisely copy, with bit for bit verification, any image file an infinite number of times. That's a baseline fact that you can just accept as an assumption.

As storage devices and file systems are improved and expanded over time, you migrate digital image files from your current one to the next one that you adopt. Digital image formats are pretty stable now, I expect DNG, JPEG and TIFF will be with us for many many years to come, so there's little format translation needed anymore as a part of migration. In general, I've found that buying enough of a current storage solution to handle three years worth of data is a good saddle point on costs vs risks. When you've filled that storage solution, you can usually buy the next one with twice the capacity at the same or lower price as the old one.

So it then comes down to policy. I maintain a working copy of my image files along with two identical and independent backup copies, locally, and one off-site copy. The likelihood that all three local repositories are going to go unrecoverable simultaneously is very low.

Upon arriving at my image processing workstation with new work, the new work is organized and imported into the system according to my pre-defined schema and then the backup program is run so it is replicated to the two archive repositories. The same applies whenever I do a rendering session: after the rendering session, I immediately fire off the backup system and all the changes are duplicated into the archives. Once a month, I swap one of the archives with a duplicated archive stored off-site, and the one I bring back is updated to reflect the current state of the data.

Everything else is an implementation detail. The key thing is to remember that digital archiving is an active process of duplication and migration with policy, not a matter of how long media will survive. Analog archiving is entirely concerned with media permanence and catalog maintenance, by comparison.

G

Godfrey,

Thanks for the post. This is very helpful as I am new to digital, I understand your logic, and will be adapting a similar system for files made with a MM.

Cal

 

[Joe Vitessa]

Decades ago I went to art school and shot lots of B&W. When I was married my wife objected to having all these shots of other women from my past and I more or less was forced to throw away all my negatives.

Next purge happened after I got divorced...

Now that I'm old I wish I had kept all my old negatives from the college years, but I'm o.k. with getting rid of the wife.

Cal

Classic. Just classic.

 

[Godfrey]

Negatives don't degrade quickly if they are properly processed in the first place. ...

Tell that to my younger self from 1965 to 1980...
Unfortunately, I can't go back in time and "properly process in the first place" all the negatives (and slides!) that were already degrading by 1980.

I've managed to scan prints and film of all that remains, which still presents a body of several thousand photos—adequate documentation for my early years of photography.

Not every photograph I've ever made is a masterpiece worth of archival processing, ya know? ;-)

G

 

[Godfrey]

You had a 1/4 ton of negatives, for me it is an inconceivable amount of images.
A very rough calculation based on one ounce per roll, would lead me to think you burned 8000+ rolls of film, or a quarter million images?
I can't even imagine scanning 1000 images.
Have you considered making video? 😀
I understand now... at least. Well sort of.

Scanning 1000 negatives is a huge undertaking.

I started working in my father/uncle/grandfather's darkroom when I was eight. I was a fortunate child ... my uncle's friend gave me a motherlode of film and paper, processing chemistry when he closed his photo business. I thought nothing of spooling up 20 rolls of Tri-X and shooting it all at a football game, at a school play, around the neighborhood, etc. I'd process everything as fast as I could and read the negatives while they were still wet, on the light box, as I was too eager to wait for them to dry.

8000 rolls? Sounds about right. Doing photography was my only pastime aside from reading and going to school during those years. Even into my first college career, I'd often shoot three-five rolls of film a day, process them in the evening, and be up to the wee hours proofing the photos I thought were worth looking at further.

For some, my passion for photography bordered on obsession. For others, it still is an obsession. ;-)

G