ANALOGUE TO DIGITAL : - COPY - SCAN - RESTORE - OLD FILM STOCK - NEGATIVES - TRANSPARENCIES - PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES - COLOUR - MONOCHROME

A SHOEBOX OF FAMILY HISTORICAL ASSETS : -

Many of us have old images stored away in a cardboard shoebox. A few may have a collection of old transparencies (slides),  and either no longer have a projector or don’t want to go through the problems of setting up one with its screen. Some may have monochromic negatives  of various dimensions, dating from their parents or grandparents photographic adventures: 

While most old photographic supports, with the exception of a nitrate base image, can last between a hundred and two hundred years, under the proper conditions. The majority of us have our old photographs and negatives stored away under bad conditions. . 

Negatives, transparencies and photographic prints are damaged by light, heat, chemicals and pollutants. They can be damaged by ultraviolet light and dust. Low humidity, or dry air, will cause the photographs to become brittle.  High humidity, or water damage will cause mould. 

We might assume the images stored in our photographic albums aligned in a tight line on our bookshelves are enough. However photographic albums can be physically unstable, particularly if the pages include adhesives or plastics. If the album is made up of self-adhesive pages popular from the 1960s to the 1990s,

Factors such as bad processing techniques, the some low cost One Hour Photo processors removed a stabilizer agent from their end processing which they considered it not really necessary. These negatives can be identified by their purple cast:

 Putting all this aside, even under museum conditions, film supports degrade.  Damage is either Light Damage, due to exposure to too much ultraviolet light, or Dark damage, this is the damage caused by the contamination of the support as it was being stored, humidity, dust, pollutants, fingerprints etc, All these sit in the dark with the support and take its time to degrade the image.

SO WHAT TO DO:

Restoring an entire collection of images is time consuming and an expensive venture. Digitizing a photograph and the negative from which it was printed from is a futile operation.  

A client should privilege the negative and transparencies over the prints. Since there is more data to work with.

Negative strips often contain multiple images of the same scene, meaning we want only one or two from the strip, not the six. The same can be said concerning rolls of film. A 36 exposure roll of film might only contain 6 shots that immortalized an event, and maybe only one or two image may merit a restoration. 

The same applies to prints where the negative no longer exists: Either the image is worth a restoration or just a digital copy for a future generation. 

Probably the best technique is digitalize all negs and slides that have been selected as important. The digitalization process involves a straight copy of the images, and generation of one or more contact sheet in a PDF format, and the file stockage is saved on two separate USB keys. The client can use the contact sheet to select which images they should restore and to which level of restoration they are willing to engage in, or keep the files for passing on.

An example of a contact sheet: -