My project this summer was to scan all of my own
photo negatives and photos that I’ve had stored away ever since I
purchased my first digital camera. I was under this crazy assumption
that I was organized in the storage of my photos, I
even had a numbering system, but turns out I don’t know who I was
fooling because it was a mess!
Here they all are, and yes, those boxes are full as well:
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| Ask me how many completely identical shots I have of Cinderella Castle Walt Disney World. |
In the end, I scanned my personal photos and negatives from
1979 through to 2007. I like scanning photos better than negatives
because you get microscopic pieces of dirt on negatives that are easily
wiped off of a photo.
The top one below is the scanned negative, the bottom one is the scanned photo, both un-retouched. If your photo has kept it correct tones and colors, it's definitely easier to scan it rather than the negative:
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| Add caption |
BUT - having the negatives
shows me the order I took the photos which was extremely helpful
because often the number order was not printed automatically on the
back, and for some reason I put the photos out of order in the photo album. Why would I have done that? And then I mixed in other people's photos, ugh it was a mess! :-) But it's finished now, whew!!!!
So, everything of mine that was a negative or photo
is now scanned, divided by sets of negatives. Future steps will be to
figure out any specific dates I possibly can. I would always write on
the envelope for the photos, but rarely included
more than the general month! Sometimes it said “Spring 1988” or
“Disney Photos”. I wish I had written days on there, oh well!
For now I just have some folders that are filed just by developed date, and yes, I had a terrible habit of waiting months, sometimes years before getting film developed. What was wrong with me? :-D
It was amazing to see how far we’ve come with
photos – back in the day we mailed our negatives off and waited weeks to
get the photos in the mail, only to find our fingers in front of the
lens, or the photos were blurry, or you look like some sort of one-eyed over-exposed weirdo:
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| What a great shot! I should totally make this my profile pic! |
Now my sister
takes thousands of photos in a months’ time. But I think we value them
less now for having so many. I remember sitting down and poring over
my grandparents photo albums. But as a contrast, today nobody is going
to sit and slog through the 12000+ photos we
took just last year.
Good! Now get to work! Next up for me is to scan the box of negatives that belonged to my Grandparents! Soon, maybe not today though. :-)
