How many negatives have you shot in your life?

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Sixteen years ago I moved my studio from a 6,000 sq ft space with a huge darkroom to my home. Sixteen years ago wasn't the peak of my film shooting but over 32 years of shooting as a professional and another 8 years as a young amateur I wound up with a massive number of negatives. I would estimate the file cabinets and boxes of negatives represented about 200,000 B&W negatives from 35mm to 11x14 not to mention the huge number of rolls and sheets of transparencies. Most of this was from assignments and most were advertising related. In the ad world the life of any image is short. It might be used for a year or only one ad.

What to do with all this film. Well, I decided to toss thousands of negatives. A number of clients didn't even exist anymore and most of the images were very dated and hadn't been used for years. I contacted my clients to see if they wanted the film and only one responded. The next step was to dispose if them. One afternoon I started hauling thousands of negatives to the dumpster. There was a sad moment because there were some really good shots and many of the projects war done for some excellent art directors that I really enjoyed working with. This mass of negatives represented a major period of my professional life.

Now I'm moving again. I'm moving to larger quarters and faced with disposing of thousands of DC's and DVD's full of images from the digital phase of my life. With digital it's not as easy as looking at a sheet of negs and tossing it in a trash can. All of my discs are labeled by client, some job info and date. The problem is I'd like to keep some of the images for future promotion of my work. Unfortunately this involves looking at hundreds of discs on my computer and putting individual files on a separate hard drive to archive. What a pain.

The next think I had to do is pack my documentary work. I'd never throw these away. They represent the best phase of my work and are mostly historic and can never be recreated. All of my negs from 35mm to 8x10 are 99.9% B&W and are all in archival pages and most in VueAll archival binders. I'm guessing there are well over 100,000 negatives. Everything you see in the pho are boxes of documentary negatives. Behind the boxes is another large container of documentary work too.

Because these are precious to me and are willed to the historical society museum upon my parting this earth I'm transporting them to my new digs myself.

My question, how many shots have you made in your lifetime on film only? How do you preserve them? What are your future plans for them?

I think back to Brett Weston who burned his negatives on his 81st (check birthday) birthday. I simply could not do that nor even if I knew they would fall into my ex-wifes hands which they're not.
 

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Not as many as you (OP), but plenty enough to cause storage headaches. And that's just the ones I decided to keep. Perhaps another question is, "how many negatives did you decide to burn/toss?" ...Because they were total non-keepers. Answer: more than I've kept!

As for shooting negatives, I'm just not compelled to shoot negatives. However, I once participated in a project where we shot creatives. That was a great experience. I tend to like creative people much more than negative people.
 
I pretty much stopped shooting film in 2002. Up to then, from about 1985 or so, each year would have been a few hundred rolls of 135-36exp film for my own personal work, along with probably a similar amount of client work. It mostly still exists, but I rarely look at it. However, I do want to digitize some of the personal work... eventually. As I get older, the feeling of time running out becomes progressively stronger and the desire to spend the time digitizing is difficult to muster. Meanwhile I'm still creating images digitally at a prolific rate and of course have fallen behind in post production of those...

I think your decision to dispose of the commercial work is the right one. You've been paid for it and as you said, the images have run their short lifespans. Why dedicate resources to something that won't generate any additional revenue?

Lesson learned with DVD archives is they're very space inefficient, become incredibly heavy and there's no guarantee the disks will be readable (but CDs seem to be worse). I long ago eliminated them and instead migrate the archive to ever increasingly larger hard drives while keeping final edits in a couple independent online 'cloud' archives.

I'm curious, the historical society to which you've willed your documentary work - do they know they'll be receiving it? I wonder how many such organizations are able (and willing) to intake such a quantity of materials?
 
I'm getting close to the 100K mark. They are mostly a mess. I really need a few interns to dig through them for a month and organize them - but that's not happening anytime soon.

Currently about 1/3 are in binder sheets. Large format are in a few metal boxes (about 2K negs) The rest are still in rolls - some with contact sheets, some with scans. All in a couple giant tupperware tubs.

Ideally, I'd make contacts of everything, organize at least roughly by time period and build in a system for flagging those that had exhibition prints (beyond my grease pencil marked sheets). But I'm not sure where to go from here. So I keep shooting.
 
No idea how many but certainly not that much. However I don't see any need to get rid of them. There are other things I would get rid of before tossing out unique items. Certainly if I moved to a larger place.
 
How many negatives have you shot in your life?
Click to expand...
That question is pretty much impossible to answer, since years worth of negatives from the days of my misspent youth have been lost to the fog of war - I mean life.

For a non-commercial photographer, I do have a fair amount of negatives from later years, though. I have ten of these binders full of negatives and chromes (E-6): http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/61870-REG/Vue_All_V200_Archival_Safe_T_Binder_With.html (probably 75% chromes as I used to shoot a lot of Fuji Velvia for my color work).
 
rscheffler said:
I think your decision to dispose of the commercial work is the right one. You've been paid for it and as you said, the images have run their short lifespans. Why dedicate resources to something that won't generate any additional revenue?

Lesson learned with DVD archives is they're very space inefficient, become incredibly heavy and there's no guarantee the disks will be readable (but CDs seem to be worse). I long ago eliminated them and instead migrate the archive to ever increasingly larger hard drives while keeping final edits in a couple independent online 'cloud' archives.

I'm curious, the historical society to which you've willed your documentary work - do they know they'll be receiving it? I wonder how many such organizations are able (and willing) to intake such a quantity of materials?
Click to expand...

I'm doing basically what you are with digital files archiving them to had drives but I still find it a pain to locate old files. I'm an old film guy that's used to throwing file pages on a light box and looking at them with a loupe. It just seems so much easier.

My digital library is 98% work files that I purge every few months. I have a Mac Pro I do all my digital work on and have internal drives and archive work to one of two of those. I regularly go through and toss ones that are inactive or have been on the disc for a couple of years. Of course I have a couple of clients that regularly lose (misplace) their files and I have to send them on a disc to them again. I encourage my clients to let me send their jobs out on DVDs rather than electronc transfers. With a disc they upload it to the server and store the disc. On a couple of occasions the server has crashed and the client was able to re load from the discs. I also Mel the jobs on file for a couple of years.

I shoot very little personal work on digital. Museums won't hardly accept digital files to archive due to the issues of maintaining that archive.

The historical society / museum and I have signed an agreement to house my work after my departing. The Tennessee state museum in Nashville has started purchasing archival prints for a special collection and the library at Vanderbilt University has show an interest.

The East Tn Historical society and museum house the Thompson collection which consists of thousands of circuit camera negs and prints as well as large format plates and negs. They're a detailed history of the region. The society established a similar collection of my work, the Dudenbostel collection, for educational study. They currently have a large exhibition and some negs plus a thousand or so high res scans that will be replaced by my original negs and prints in time. They've had a couple of fund raisers and dinner to raise money to establish the archive.
 
11,134 rolls of 135
1278 rolls of 120
5123 sheets from 4x5 to 11x14

And counting, except that I have shot no film since August 2012, although I have developed quite a bit for other people.

All in sleeves, in archival boxes, indexed. I had to take several weeks off work to sort and archive the mess I finally got back after over a year of hassling after Sygma was wound up. If they had kept track of everything properly, there might have been another 1,000 rolls or so. They lost the originals of most of my best work.

Since August 2012, about 50,000 frames with MM and 246.

Yes, I am uptight.

Marty
 
My problem is not storage (which I don't really like either), but not being to put my fingers on a certain negative. Cataloging is a crazy task, I wonder how these digital photographers do it. Maybe if you were OCD.
 
When you look through your old negatives, how many different films did you guys shoot? It must be kind of cool to look through all the kinds of film that you might still have in your negatives which are no longer available. It's cool to me at least. Did you develop different relationships with the practice of photography at different ages? This is an interesting thread for me as a young photographer.
 
I´m nowhere near the OP´s count, but I have shot a fair amount of B/W and colour negative.

I would certainly like to hear Tom Abrahamsson´s answer to this question.....
 
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