Discard Negatives ??!!!

tokam · Apr 12, 2023

I've been shooting and processing Black and White since 1973. Printed in the darkroom up until 1995. Started scanning in 2010. (In the intervening period I shot mainly colour neg, commercially processed, and started flirting with d*g*t*l point and shoots.) I kept and scanned all of the colour negs.

Although I resumed B/W film shooting around 2010 I only develop and scan with the occasional commercial print of B/W negs.

I have scanned and cleaned up all of my negs from 1973 plus slides from my dad going back to the mid '60s. The manual effort in this exercise must be several thousand hours. The scanning was done on a Nikon Coolscan 5000.
This exercise included scanning thousands of images that were never wet printed. Plenty of gems amongst them which would not have seen the light of day if they weren't scanned.

No one in my family is going to revisit the neg / slide source material and some are in poor condition, I certainly wouldn't want to wet print them again. I have 5 sets of backups of the Tiff and corrected JPG files.

At this point the older negs are totally redundant and can be disposed of. I'll continue to shoot and scan film because I like the process and the equipment.

MurrayMinchin · Apr 12, 2023

I can think of two reasons to keep the negs;

1) Todays technology could be tomorrows 8 track tape equivalent.

2) Bit rot.

tokam · Apr 12, 2023

MurrayMinchin said:
I can think of two reasons to keep the negs;

1) Todays technology could be tomorrows 8 track tape equivalent.

2) Bit rot.

No manufacturer is going to produce a consumer scanner to match the Coolscan 5000 so the images I have are probably as good as they will ever be. Besides, my descendants wouldn't know what to do with the negs.

Bit rot is a concern. I'd like to find software which will produce a list of file checksums, (SHA-nnn?), of the files on my backups which could be periodically refreshed and compared to see if the stored data has changed. Any changes and I could identify the corrupted files and replace them from a good copy.

MattKing · Apr 12, 2023

CMoore said:
Really.?
I never realized 110 was made positive.
I suppose MOST people that owned a camera in the 60s and 70s did not shoot 35mm or larger.
Amazing what has come and gone ... in all products ... over the years.

Kodak also offered a slide duplication service that was marketed to the travelling salespeople of the world.
You could get all the 35mm slides in your slide presentation duplicated onto 110, and then you were able to take those much smaller slides, loaded into the much smaller pocket carousel trays, and project them with the much smaller pocket carousel projector.
The trays and the projectors are amazingly good, and quite cute too!

Agulliver · Apr 12, 2023

I remember using the Minolta 110 SLR MK1 (the one that looks like a space ship) at school in the very early 80s and the photography teacher scoffing at the little negatives. He was also unaware that Kodachrome was still available in 110 at the time. So I took that camera out to a BMX competition and photographed the freestyle riders doing aerials off a quarter pipe on 100ASA Kodacolor , which was the best negative film at the time I think....and had the best couple of shots blown up to poster size, probably 80cm on the longer size. Teacher was duly eating his words.

Even just this year I celebrated the joint 50th birthdays of myself and my wife, and our 25th anniversary. At the party I scattered some P&S film cameras about including a simple 110 camera loaded with Lomography Tiger film. Got some really nice shots from it....as long as you don't want to crop them. It's actually not a terrible format for sharing pictures online.

Thinking of negatives, in 2018 my mother was having one of her periodic reorganisations of her house and I came across a lot of negatives from 1976 that I did not recognise. Took them home and scanned them on my Epson and found that about 10% I recognised from prints - mostly of me as a 3 year old. But there were shots I don't ever recall seeing, perhaps not the keepers but decent enough photographs and lovely memories. Scanning them also permitted colour tweaking that would have been difficult for the lab back in 1976 and certainly a degree of customisation not possible then. The scans ultimately look better than the 40+ year old prints ever did. Always keep the negatives/slides. You just never know what technology will bring to the table. And I bet that if I took selected negs to a proper lab for optical printing and was able to give instructions on what I want the prints to look like....they'd make better prints than 70s automated systems.

foc · Apr 12, 2023

If you wish to view a negative, all you need is a light source.
Try that with a hard drive or USB.

Alan Edward Klein · Apr 12, 2023

MurrayMinchin said:
I can think of two reasons to keep the negs;

1) Todays technology could be tomorrows 8 track tape equivalent.

2) Bit rot.

Make prints, frame them, and give them to relatives and friends. Watch them enjoy them now and know that they'll treasure them in the future.

MurrayMinchin · Apr 12, 2023

Alan Edward Klein said:
Make prints, frame them, and give them to relatives and friends. Watch them enjoy them now and know that they'll treasure them in the future.

Yup. My housewarming gift to my sister (an enlargement from a 4x5 negative) is now in the baby room of a nephew.

I don't consider a photograph to really exist until it's physically in this world, either as a negative on film, or a digital file somehow printed onto paper or some other support material.

CMoore · Apr 12, 2023

MattKing said:
Kodak also offered a slide duplication service that was marketed to the travelling salespeople of the world.
You could get all the 35mm slides in your slide presentation duplicated onto 110, and then you were able to take those much smaller slides, loaded into the much smaller pocket carousel trays, and project them with the much smaller pocket carousel projector.
The trays and the projectors are amazingly good, and quite cute too!

Wow....OK..........almost the "Thumb Drive" of its day.

Luckless · Apr 12, 2023

MurrayMinchin said:
I can think of two reasons to keep the negs;

1) Todays technology could be tomorrows 8 track tape equivalent.

2) Bit rot.

I'm curious why you're worried about bit rot more than you are about dust/scratches/mold/fungus on a single-point-of-failure object? Especially with image data. Have you ever tried poking at a jpeg in a hex editor to see how much you need to flip to zero before you can actually tell a difference?

Wallendo · Apr 12, 2023

I currently save all my negatives (except the two rolls I fixed and then developed). I mostly shot slides when young 60's and 70's and still have most of those. When I started college I switched to color negative film and unfortunately have lost most of those negatives and prints from that era related to multiple moves. I lost interest in photography for a while, although I did have a camcorder. Most of that was due to extremely long work hours and training. When life normalized after that, one day a found a pack of old negatives and had prints made. Seeing those images reignited my love of photography (a good reason to save negatives. Since that time, I have only lost 4 sets of negatives; unfortunately all four sets from a trip to the Amazon lost during a move. Even worse, the negatives were stored with the prints so I only had lab jpg images which I have done my best to enhance. I now save all negatives separately from their prints.

I also have digital cameras. With these I tend to delete poor quality images, especially when I have taken several shots of the same scene.

I can understand why photographers in small dorm rooms and apartments may not want to keep their prints ... but, I suspect many of them will have regrets about this 20 years from now. Many of the older images I value were of routine scenes which meant little at the time, but now are invaluable memories

MurrayMinchin · Apr 12, 2023

Luckless said:
I'm curious why you're worried about bit rot more than you are about dust/scratches/mold/fungus on a single-point-of-failure object? Especially with image data...

Once in a while I search out articles from people who are deep into the weeds on the topic. Here's a snippet and a link to one such article written in 2015:

"...In 2008, the PLA asked us if we would re-make the London’s Riverscape Panorama yet again, this time
using digital photography, to be completed for their March 2009 Centenary celebrations. At that
ceremony, we were asked if the 1937 Silver Gelatine Black and White printed panorama, already 70
years old would be likely to survive until the PLA’s Bi-centenary in March 2109? Since the original
prints were carefully archived by the Museum of London, we replied that it was very likely indeed, as
many Silver Gelatine prints survive from the Victorian era.

The PLA Director then said that he ‘assumed’ that there would be no problem for our 2008 Digital
Photography Riverscape Panorama to be available for their Bi-centenary, in only 100 years time? We
had written a Digital Image Conservation Module for a Postgraduate Photography Course at London
College of Communication, where I was Course Director. We were both very aware of the fragility of
image data, in storage and during regular migration. If our 2008 digital panorama was only to be
archived in the Museum of London as data, there could be no guarantee that it could survive for 100
years..."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319142593_The_Artefact_as_a_Time_Machine_A_safe_way_of_sending_our_historic_digital_photographic_panorama_of_London%27s_Docklands_two_to_three_hundred_years_into_the_future

Their preferred method for saving a digital image for hundreds of years came as a bit of a surprise to me.

Roger Thoms · Apr 12, 2023

Sometimes I take film to the lab for “processing only”, sure hope they don’t discard the negatives afterwards.

Roger

Alan Edward Klein · Apr 12, 2023

Roger Thoms said:
Sometimes I take film to the lab for “processing only”, sure hope they don’t discard the negatives afterwards.

Roger

Pro labs return the negatives in archival plastic sheets.

Roger Thoms · Apr 12, 2023

Alan Edward Klein said:
Pro labs return the negatives in archival plastic sheets.

Hey Alan, I was trying to make a light hearted joke. Develop only, meaning no scans, no prints, no contact sheets. It would be pretty funny if they discarded the negatives after developing them. Actually for roll film I have the negatives “do not cut” so I put them in archival sleeves myself. Some of my camera imprint data between the frames and you have to be super careful not to cut the imprinted data in half.

Roger

Sirius Glass · Apr 13, 2023

Roger Thoms said:
Hey Alan, I was trying to make a light hearted joke. Develop only, meaning no scans, no prints, no contact sheets. It would be pretty funny if they discarded the negatives after developing them. Actually for roll film I have the negatives “do not cut” so I put them in archival sleeves myself. Some of my camera imprint data between the frames and you have to be super careful not to cut the imprinted data in half.

Roger

Roger, I got the humor the first time I read it.

Alan Edward Klein · Apr 13, 2023

It's late. Sorry if I missed the joke.

Dusty Negative · Apr 13, 2023

Ok...who here tones (Selenium or ...?) their negatives for archival purposes? I've been shooting film for a whopping five years now, do not/not tone them, ergo I have no way of telling (yet) how archival they are. I store them in archival holders and put them in a binder/box and store the boxes in my basement, which stays cool throughout the year (though a bit on the humid side). Certainly not airtight, but definitely away from dust.

Agulliver · Apr 13, 2023

Luckless said:
I'm curious why you're worried about bit rot more than you are about dust/scratches/mold/fungus on a single-point-of-failure object? Especially with image data. Have you ever tried poking at a jpeg in a hex editor to see how much you need to flip to zero before you can actually tell a difference?

A neg or slide with dust or other marks on it can still yield an image. I've never seen mold or fungus on a piece of film but I suppose potentially it's a decent enough growth substrate if stored badly. Even then it could probably be cleaned.

Bit rot is a thing, though over a long time for sure. And yes, I have tried poking at various image files including JPEGS with editors back in the early 90s. Took surprisingly little to corrupt the image - though not always beyond recognition.

JerseyDoug · Apr 13, 2023

Fortunately my father kept many, if not all, of his 35mm negatives, dating from the late 1920's to the mid 1970's. Very few prints of these negatives survived all of the family's moves over the years but I now have the negatives, uncut and rolled up in mostly AGFA but also a few KODAK film cans. I scanned all of them a number of years ago, but I am now redoing the scans because both my equipment and my technique are much improved. The only negatives I can not re-scan are a few rolls of unlabeled nitrocellulose film that were turned over to the fire department after the first scanning, out of an abundance of caution.

Most of my father's pictures of people are unidentified despite the best efforts of our extended family to put names to faces. But the pictures of places and daily life are a fascinating look back at what we mistakenly think of as simpler times. Prints I made of his action shots of stripped down Model T Fords racing on the Michigan dunes have been requested by a number of family members.

gbroadbridge · May 1, 2023

tokam said:
I've been shooting and processing Black and White since 1973. Printed in the darkroom up until 1995. Started scanning in 2010. (In the intervening period I shot mainly colour neg, commercially processed, and started flirting with d*g*t*l point and shoots.) I kept and scanned all of the colour negs.

Although I resumed B/W film shooting around 2010 I only develop and scan with the occasional commercial print of B/W negs.

I have scanned and cleaned up all of my negs from 1973 plus slides from my dad going back to the mid '60s. The manual effort in this exercise must be several thousand hours. The scanning was done on a Nikon Coolscan 5000.
This exercise included scanning thousands of images that were never wet printed. Plenty of gems amongst them which would not have seen the light of day if they weren't scanned.

No one in my family is going to revisit the neg / slide source material and some are in poor condition, I certainly wouldn't want to wet print them again. I have 5 sets of backups of the Tiff and corrected JPG files.

At this point the older negs are totally redundant and can be disposed of. I'll continue to shoot and scan film because I like the process and the equipment.

Late reply I know, but I did similar quite recently. Literally thousands of colour and b&w negs (35mm and 120's) going back to the late 70's.

I scanned the lot, did some comparison prints at exactly the same size, and decided that the raw TIFF files are sufficient for archival purposes.

All the negs were shredded and I feel no loss at all, they're all backed up in several locations if anyone should be interested in years to come.
I'm sure they'll solve any problems that need to be solved if they wish to view them.

I found many images that would never have seen the light of day if they'd languished in a drawer slowly deteriorating.

Still shooting film, but now I develop, scan, print and then shred the neg.

Chan Tran · May 1, 2023

I can understand why they don't want the negative but then why use film? When I have my film developed at the lab I only want the negatives. They never can make prints the way I like.

Alan Edward Klein · May 1, 2023

Chan Tran said:
I can understand why they don't want the negative but then why use film? When I have my film developed at the lab I only want the negatives. They never can make prints the way I like.

Life is full of carrying old baggage and stuff around with you, always afraid to rid yourself of it as if it's your right arm. It's nice to free yourself from all this stuff. As you get older, you'll see what this means. It's very liberating.

Chan Tran · May 1, 2023

Alan Edward Klein said:
Life is full of carrying old baggage and stuff around with you, always afraid to rid yourself of it as if it's your right arm. It's nice to free yourself from all this stuff. As you get older, you'll see what this means. It's very liberating.

You don't understand. When I sent my film for developing all I want is the negative. I don't care for the prints. I tossed the prints.

gbroadbridge · May 1, 2023

Chan Tran said:
I can understand why they don't want the negative but then why use film? When I have my film developed at the lab I only want the negatives. They never can make prints the way I like.

Digital looks nothing like film (at least to my eyes).

Don't get me wrong, I shoot digital as well, and have tried just about every film sim out there (Film Pack, etc), but it's not the same.

Plus, film forces me to pre-visualise and concentrate more on process, rather than simply shooting shots like a machine gun.
I don't do commercial work on film, obviously.

I also certainly don't miss the hours/days spent in a darkroom printing a single 14x11 RA4 print.

Discard Negatives ??!!!

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