DownUnder
Nikon Nomad
Some posters talk about prints as if they were manna from the heavens, as maybe they are. Anyway, let me tell you another story, about prints, printing, and what I had to do last year.
Before we moved back to mainland Australia from Tasmania, it took us about six months to tidy up things, dispose of unwanted goods, sort, cull, and start that most infernal of essential tasks, packing.
Being me, terminally Saggitarian that I am, I left the garage (my domain in our household) til the last. Finally I had to tackle this two-car space, full almost to the roof with things put away and mostly forgotten. All of which proved not too difficult - until I got to the boxes of prints.
Over the years, I've made many thousands of prints, most from 1975 when I moved to Australia up to the mid-'00s when common sense prevailed and the cost of enlarging paper went sky high and I realized it was fiscal madness to go on printing so promiscuouslyl.
There I was faced with twenty or so large cartons of prints, most so heavy I could barely lift those boxes. Who knew printing paper weighs so much?
Over three days i cut up between 5,000 and 7,000 old prints.
The first cull disposed of images of anything I couldn't remember taking or couldn't recall anything about.
Then the party shots of long forgotten twinks playing up and being silly for the shy geek with the camera and flash who went around making himself feel like one of the crowd by poking his lens at anyone and everybody. As far as I recall, none of those images were ever given away - nobody asked for them.
Next came the many (too many) ex-friends and acquaintances I couldn't stand seeing again or never spoke to, or who couldn't stand seeing me again or never spoke to me.
All of which reduced the pile by maybe 30 percent.
Then images relating to old love affairs/partners, places I lived in during my decade in Sydney and the next twenty years in Melbourne, the Velveeta landscapes, nice townscapes framed by pretty trees or meandering rivers, and the lovingly composed shots of all the pretty things I so quickly found meaningless and put away to mildew and molder in storage boxes. About 30 percent of the remaining pile bit the dust.
The contact sheets (why why WHY did I waste so much paper doing those?) were put through the shredder. Maybe 10 percent.
Family images, past partners I still have happy memories of, shots of my long-ago apartments in King's Cross, Pott's Point, Woollahra and Mosman, and all the portraits of long-deceased cats were sorted out last, and mostly kept.
Too many boxes of old Agfa and Fuji slides had faded away to nothing, so many blank celluloid strips. As a last effort to try to restore some of the lost pictures, I did multiple pass scans of the most valued ones, and in a few cases got faint images resembling pen lines. Out they went. (The vintage slide boxes were given to a friend who collects photographic ephemera, who was thrilled at this unexpected gift.)
A few treasures turned up. About fifty prints (the original negatives lost) of my first journey to Bali in 1970, when all things Balinese were fresh and invigorating and a canny photographer could easily sell black-and-white images even of Kuta Beach in those halcyon pre-high rise resort hotel days. Also found was a box of Kodak Medalist enlarging paper (1950s) with 40 prints and six rolls of original 120 negatives of a family reunion in Canada in 1982, the last time I saw my greatly loved grandfather, then 88 and still active - he even made his own maple syrup in springtime but passed away a few years later, in his 90s. No-one in the family has ever seen those photos. Saddest of all is that almost everyone in them is now no longer alive.
The sorting, culling, cutting and shredding took four days and a fair few bottles of Tasmanian red wine. Dealing with the emotional flak has taken a while longer. I still can't bring myself to print those 1982 family shots. Some day I will.
As we are a no-children household, an album of our late beloved cats is in the planning stage. I'll do the B&W printing and the color scans next month, when I've finally found the effort and the time to set up my new darkroom.
Such a waste of printing paper, even if at the time of making those original prints, they had meaning for me. I do wonder why I took so many blah landscapes when postcards would have sufficed to jog my memory.
As for the cost, well - spread over the years, it wasn't so bad, but if I had what I've spent on printing paper for those thousands of prints in the bank, I could be squiring myself around town in a nice old restored Jaguar four-door sedan...
We live, we learn. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, isn't it?
Before we moved back to mainland Australia from Tasmania, it took us about six months to tidy up things, dispose of unwanted goods, sort, cull, and start that most infernal of essential tasks, packing.
Being me, terminally Saggitarian that I am, I left the garage (my domain in our household) til the last. Finally I had to tackle this two-car space, full almost to the roof with things put away and mostly forgotten. All of which proved not too difficult - until I got to the boxes of prints.
Over the years, I've made many thousands of prints, most from 1975 when I moved to Australia up to the mid-'00s when common sense prevailed and the cost of enlarging paper went sky high and I realized it was fiscal madness to go on printing so promiscuouslyl.
There I was faced with twenty or so large cartons of prints, most so heavy I could barely lift those boxes. Who knew printing paper weighs so much?
Over three days i cut up between 5,000 and 7,000 old prints.
The first cull disposed of images of anything I couldn't remember taking or couldn't recall anything about.
Then the party shots of long forgotten twinks playing up and being silly for the shy geek with the camera and flash who went around making himself feel like one of the crowd by poking his lens at anyone and everybody. As far as I recall, none of those images were ever given away - nobody asked for them.
Next came the many (too many) ex-friends and acquaintances I couldn't stand seeing again or never spoke to, or who couldn't stand seeing me again or never spoke to me.
All of which reduced the pile by maybe 30 percent.
Then images relating to old love affairs/partners, places I lived in during my decade in Sydney and the next twenty years in Melbourne, the Velveeta landscapes, nice townscapes framed by pretty trees or meandering rivers, and the lovingly composed shots of all the pretty things I so quickly found meaningless and put away to mildew and molder in storage boxes. About 30 percent of the remaining pile bit the dust.
The contact sheets (why why WHY did I waste so much paper doing those?) were put through the shredder. Maybe 10 percent.
Family images, past partners I still have happy memories of, shots of my long-ago apartments in King's Cross, Pott's Point, Woollahra and Mosman, and all the portraits of long-deceased cats were sorted out last, and mostly kept.
Too many boxes of old Agfa and Fuji slides had faded away to nothing, so many blank celluloid strips. As a last effort to try to restore some of the lost pictures, I did multiple pass scans of the most valued ones, and in a few cases got faint images resembling pen lines. Out they went. (The vintage slide boxes were given to a friend who collects photographic ephemera, who was thrilled at this unexpected gift.)
A few treasures turned up. About fifty prints (the original negatives lost) of my first journey to Bali in 1970, when all things Balinese were fresh and invigorating and a canny photographer could easily sell black-and-white images even of Kuta Beach in those halcyon pre-high rise resort hotel days. Also found was a box of Kodak Medalist enlarging paper (1950s) with 40 prints and six rolls of original 120 negatives of a family reunion in Canada in 1982, the last time I saw my greatly loved grandfather, then 88 and still active - he even made his own maple syrup in springtime but passed away a few years later, in his 90s. No-one in the family has ever seen those photos. Saddest of all is that almost everyone in them is now no longer alive.
The sorting, culling, cutting and shredding took four days and a fair few bottles of Tasmanian red wine. Dealing with the emotional flak has taken a while longer. I still can't bring myself to print those 1982 family shots. Some day I will.
As we are a no-children household, an album of our late beloved cats is in the planning stage. I'll do the B&W printing and the color scans next month, when I've finally found the effort and the time to set up my new darkroom.
Such a waste of printing paper, even if at the time of making those original prints, they had meaning for me. I do wonder why I took so many blah landscapes when postcards would have sufficed to jog my memory.
As for the cost, well - spread over the years, it wasn't so bad, but if I had what I've spent on printing paper for those thousands of prints in the bank, I could be squiring myself around town in a nice old restored Jaguar four-door sedan...
We live, we learn. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, isn't it?
mrtoml
Mancunian
I found Mike Johnston’s thoughts about prints instructive:
https://theonlinephotographer.typep...apher/2018/07/the-pile-of-prints-problem.html
https://theonlinephotographer.typep...apher/2018/07/the-pile-of-prints-problem.html
You have to love it when the most meaningful thing you photographed was cats... and I understand this. I have pictures of my old cats too that I keep. Many others were thrown out and I'm only 47. That said, the rest of the photos lost meaning over time for you, but they certainly had meaning when you were taking them and you were living in the moment the best you knew how to. As far as costs, never stress money that is long gone...