i suspect the film was probably higher speed that asa 10, more like 50 or so, but the biggest reason is that this is a 5 inch long negative, nearly 4 inches wide, large format by anyone's measure, so a huge enlargement would not show much grain.
In the museum I work at we LOVE it when folks bring in old stashes of negatives like these, and we're daily mourn in the knowledge that there are folks out there tossing grandma's negatives because "aw, nobody cares about those."
We do. They are history preserved in a format that is still easily recoverable. Museums around the world are terrified at what the digital world will leave in its wake, and the Smithsonian has a project underway to figure out a solution.
Did you know storage of digital movies -- the hollywood blockbusters -- costs tens of thousands of dollars a year, each -- while storage of film costs hundreds?
Film just sits on a shelf. Digital has to be tended, upgraded and migrated as software and media change.
Tell it, Brothers and Sisters!
I am a retired Librarian, with almost 40 years in the field. As a Photographer I began in my very early teens. I still have slides and negatives from back then, in the mid to late 1950s and beyond. I also have negatives and slides my Father shot in the mid 1930s on iuntil his death in 2001. ALL these negatives and slides are still viewable, could be scanned into digital, massaged, and printed. I also have several hundred vinyl LPs, going back to the late 1940s, the beginning of the Vinyl Era. These can be played, scratches and all.
Now. NONE of these analogue products have received any special storage. Room temperature, room humidity. Some in the attic, for heaven's sake. (not the vinyl!) How many CD recordings will survive for half a century or more? My understanding is that if the index information on a CD is damaged the disc is essentially unplayable. A vinyl record with a scratch doesn't lose the entire recording, and the scratch may perhaps be "erased" with considerable difficulty.
Those who store their digital images on whatever medium, or in the cloud, are gambling that they will be recoverable in the future. How much data is now stored on, let us say, 8 inch floppy discs? Seen a drive for such lately? And of course a hard drive WILL fail at some time. Dense storage via hard drives, etc, has its own risks. My understanding is that a high density magnetic medium needs to be "refreshed" periodically, since the closely spaced domains may "self erase" their neighbors unless re-written periodically. I welcome further comment on this, since it is out of my expertise. I use a RAID I array, plus drives in a drawer, a regular backup routine, plus BackBlaze cloud, for my digital images. Scanned in analogue images are easily accesible via Lightroom. How many of our relatives have any sort of strategy for their family pictures? Not many, I'll wager. And it must be said that cloud storage it seems relies on the long term life of the storage company.
As far as I know we don't have any reliable predictions of the life span of CDs or DVDs which would suggest that we should entrust our family heritages to these storage media. Perhaps digital pictures should be printed to whatever medium suggest some degree of permanence so there would be at least some record.
I also have many prints, silver of course, some going back almost 100 years. I need to scan these in, not for preservation, but to query far-flung family members for identification of the folks pictured thereon. The proverbial shoe box filled with prints and negatives is in danger of extinction, not intentionally, but through neglect and ignorance. Granny didn't know how well she planned ahead!
Some years ago my Father told me a sad tale. He'd come home from college in the mid 1930s to discover that his mother had done some housecleaning. She'd tossed out many negatives she'd taken as a young girl in Michigan. These might have been glass plates. How many irreplaceable family images were thus lost? How many current pictures of children, grandchildren, are now lost or endangered not by action, but by inaction?
Sorry for the rant. But what other group than analogue photographers can appreciate the problem, and perhaps do something?
