Negatives Often Not Picked Up after Scanning as discussed in the New York Times

[TenEleven]

I think those who were born in a post-film era don't really get the significance of negatives. Nor, apparently, do they anticipate any advances in scanning technology.

Or perhaps it's reflective of how thoroughly disposable our current society is, but that's another can of worms.

Agreed, same situation in Japan. Local lab is absolutely drowning in boxes of negatives that they are required to keep for six months or a year. Some opt to have the scans sent directly to their smartphone, making these files even more ephemeral.

Then of course there's the issue where now you are back to the problem of a bunch of files floating around in various folders and drives. Unless you are well organized this can quickly become a problem with images and sometimes entire rolls "falling through the cracks". And that's not even touching on changing computers or

Also regarding advancements in scanner technology: My home made scans - even when I started out with a "lowly" Nikon Coolscan IV (now a 5000) absolutely beat the pants off the scans the lab gave me on CD. Even ordering the "best quality" scans - which cost quite a bit more meant you got TIFF files instead of JPEG, but these scans still had the same low-fi quality to them -- to be fair, these lab scans are completely acceptable for prints and such. However, archival quality this isn't!

Also, since I keep my negatives and also file them away in a systematic manner it meant that once I upgraded my scanner gear, I could go back and re-scan images or rolls that I deemed especially important.

Then, finally, throwing the negative out precludes any chance of you ever making a wet print. Which is a truly shame. I scan but I love wet printing - scanning to me is just the act of archiving and sighting the images. I mean, just imagine you're one of these kids ... now 10 years older and all you have is a crummy 1800x1200 JPEG lab scan with funky colors of some very meaningful moment of time in your life. Or worse, nothing at all because you dunked the phone at the local pool party. Ouch.

 

[joe bosak]

I think the fun for some is in the prints - with phones all they get is jpegs - so they don't see the relevance of negatives. Of my (all grown up) children, two don't care for film at all, the third showed interest - I bought them a camera - they used 1 film - and threw away the negatives... May be because the history here is that while they were young children we'd pick up prints and never use the negatives ourselves (but we still have them!) - in fact they all did the same as we gave them film cameras when they were little and they took their own photos...

 

[p.giannakis]

And great to see the overhead projector. I was taught physics and chemistry via one of those.

I don't even consider these to be vintage, they were using them 25 years ago when I was at university 😳

My lab scans have gone off terribly in the last few years. On the verge of not bothering with them.

Unfortunately that is the case with my colour negatives. Colour has deteriorated so much that I have to spend hours to make them look presentable. I will just scan them as b&w.

 

[Erik van Straten]

Pigments are used for color photos. Every art-painter knows that only a few pigments are lightfast. When color photos are new, they seem oh-so-beautiful. However, keep them in the dark. Check them out only occasionally. Don't hang them up.

Well-made black-and-white photos are lightfast.

 

[Retro-Grouch]

I don't even consider these to be vintage, they were using them 25 years ago when I was at university 😳


Two years ago I had to get a new flip-phone (!) to keep up with the 4K planned obsolescence scam. The twenty-something who sold me the phone referred to it as "vintage" as he was selling it to me!

 

[Retro-Grouch]

Pigments are used for color photos. Every art-painter knows that only a few pigments are lightfast. When color photos are new, they seem oh-so-beautiful. However, keep them in the dark. Check them out only occasionally. Don't hang them up.

Well-made black-and-white photos are lightfast.

Pigment-based inks are far more stable than dye-based inks and are generally considered to have a life span in excess of 100 years. The inexpensive prints one gets back from processors are virtually always dye-based, as were the standard Type C prints provided back in the days before digital; they're much more prone to fading and degradation. Nevertheless, your advice is good; store all prints in the dark for maximum longevity.
Silver-based B&W prints are in theory lightfast if processed archivally, but environmental pollutants can still attack and degrade them. Carbon-based B&W prints (technically a type of pigment print) are probably the most archival. Careful storage (as in museums) is crucial, but it does seem to have been a crap shoot when we consider what has come down to us relatively intact from the past. In the end, nothing lasts forever. Entropy always wins.

 

[raydm6]

I think the most danger to the longevity of our prints and negatives is the estate "cleanout" upon our demise 🙂

 

[Alpsman]

I think the most danger to the longevity of our prints and negatives is the estate "cleanout" upon our demise 🙂

At least we did our best.

 

[Darthfeeble]

Those of you who do shoot digital, do you keep your images on the media card your camera uses or do you erase them and shoot more on the card? Much the same with the folks who don't save the negatives. I'm playing around with film but don't shoot seriously. I do save my negs but I've probably shot in the last five years or so as many as some probably do in a month or even less.

 

[coogee]

When I first started taking photos right through my teens, I would rarely think of the negatives sitting in the paper sleeve with the prints. They were given back to me but I never used them to make more prints or to catalog them in any way. They'd get separated from the original prints and lost in time. It was all about the prints and sharing them, sticking them on the wall or in a little album. This is early-mid 80s before digital photography existed. But as a regular joe user of film to make photos and memories, I and all the people I knew had little real regard for the negatives of colour film developed and printed at chemists or department store or wherever.

Obviously now my view is different and I keep all negatives carefully but I can see how the negatives might not be considered the precious artefacts we older more experienced photographers might consider them - I wasn't trying to preserve everything forever when I was in my teens/early twenties - I was just taking photos of friends, family, whatever and sharing them.

I don't think this sounds so very different from that mindset and I don't look down on people doing exactly the same 40 years later, make photos whyever however you want, it doesn't all have to be forever and I'm sorry for them it costs so much more to get a photo from film onto a print if that's your intention or onto your phone if that's how you share memories with your friends and family.

 

[boojum]

I have every slide I have ever taken from about 1954 with the Vito II to the left up through the Pentax ME Super where I ended up. And I had all my digitals until a hard drive got scrambled. I will try and restore the HD. Why? I go back and look at them from time to time. They are reminders of people and places through my life. Yes, I always picked up my negatives, but that was before processors would scan them.

 

[JohnGellings]

Those of you who do shoot digital, do you keep your images on the media card your camera uses or do you erase them and shoot more on the card? Much the same with the folks who don't save the negatives.

I store them on HDs, with backups. You should never save your photos on SD cards. Always save them on a better storage solution and reformat your SD Card.

 

[Godfrey]

... Hey you kids! Get off the lawn! ...

😉
G

 

[drew.saunders]

I surprise the folks at the lab by asking for no scans or prints, only negatives. I'd rather have control over the process with my PIE 35mm scanner than use lab scans with colors and levels already set for me.

I found that the lowest quality scans from The Darkroom, where I send 35mm, are good enough to help me decide which negatives to scan in my Nikon Coolscan 9000. They’re included in the price, and it saves me the bother of scanning every negative only to like a few.

 

[p.giannakis]

I surprise the folks at the lab by asking for no scans or prints, only negatives.

The folks at the lab used to surprise me when they were giving me back negatives like this:


Or scans like this but without the negative :


Eventually I decided to learn how to develop them myself and never went back.

 

[agentlossing]

Eventually I decided to learn how to develop them myself and never went back.

B&W negatives are always developed by me. C41, depends on whether I'm ambitious or I get lazy. I don't shoot it often enough to get many rolls out of the chemicals before they go bad.

 

[David_Manning]

Shoot chromes, and project on a wall!!!

 

[Retro-Grouch]

Shoot chromes, and project on a wall!!!

Ahh, a photographer after my own heart (and fellow dinosaur...)!!!

 

[Godfrey]

Chromes have the narrowest exposure latitude and are the most expensive film to buy and to process. I gave away my projector and trays years ago. I prefer doing color with digital capture... 😉

Just like I prefer to process all my B&W and scan it myself. Never liked photo lab B&W processing or printing.

G

 

[Richard G]

Fred Herzog shot chromes as he had a busy day job. Rewinds the film, puts it in the mailer. And a couple of weeks later the best photographic medium ever, mounted, arrives in the mail. But it took years for these to become pages in the wonderful books of his photographs. How he shot from the hip with the camera level beats me. Genius.