Is it worth keeping negatives you have rejected?

RobC said:

depends what they are of. e.g. If they are documentary then they will have historical value. Maybe not much now, but in 100 years.

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Exactly. Bugs and flowers will look the same long after we're gone, people and environments change very rapidly. I have shots of buildings being demolished in the seventies, and the buildings they replaced have since been knocked down. Utterly mundane shots from a beginner, invaluable as evidence of a place that'll never be the same.

Well, capturing historic buildings long gone might give you everlasting fame...but, on the other hand who needs everlasting fame...I want my fun now!

Personally, I find it very liberating to let go and reduce, reduce, reduce down to the core...10-20% are keepers.

I keep them all. Even the shots to test a film or a camera. As I don't have a wet darkroom, I only scan what I want to print, or have some 'easy' access to.

I figure with film, I thought the shot worth enough to hit the shutter. Whether it turned out great or not, I still wanted to capture that frame for one reason or another. Why would I then want to discard it?

Why are some here negative about keeping negatives?

So far I have most of my negatives and slides from circa 1950-something -- not all are organized and cataloged howsomever. Of course if I had the means and the inclination to shoot three, four, five rolls a day, it might have crowded me out of the house by now. But I'm not that prolific a shooter. Even with digi-files I only trash some dubious stuff from the iPhone which I don't really use for anything serious to begin with. I have the memory card files saved, which I doubt I'll ever go back to, but drives are growing by terabytes and cheap these days!

All this accumulation may give me something to stumble through when I'm old(er) and (more) decrepit. Or, just the zeal for "I haven't finished cataloging my photos yet" may keep me going an extra year two!

Heh, cleaning out my parents' house I found no negatives -- but a shoebox worth of 4x6 prints. My mother obsessively wrote info on the backs of most of said prints. After a decade or three in the attic, the ballpoint ink most used for the captions had imprinted on the image on the next item in the stacks. Both 'rents made it into their nineties; guess they got tired of tripping over stuff.

Pat Erson said:

I'm currently scanning pix I made in 1999. Most of it is stuff I considered "awful" back then.

So yes I think you should keep everything you have.

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I've been slowly scanning (and sometimes contact printing) negatives from my great-grandparents. I'm certainly not concerned with whether they thought these were keepers or awful. I'm just very happy I have them and I'm hoping to preserve them for future generations.

Just to chime in again...here's a quote about W. Eugene Smith

Smith died, broke, in 1978. A few months earlier, two eighteen-ton trucks had hauled away all his film, prints, and tapes—22 tons of stuff—to the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.

http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/62876/

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On Instagram, someone posted an image of a show by a Japanese photographer where it's negative printed onto c-print as a negative. At least looking at that image, it didn't ' seem' like a keeper. So there's always the case that can be made?

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Gerald C Koch said:

Yes save them. I have revisited negatives and found images that I didn't see the first time. Photography is an evolutionary process. A person's tastes change over time.

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This has been my experience as well. I have printed several negatives that were twenty years old - I have found that some of my technically inferior negatives are more emotionally and aesthetically engaging than the better composed/exposed ones. Tastes change over time. I try not to throw any negatives out even though I now have a ridiculous number of binders.

I just discard the very bad ones. The ones that are not good but I some how few I like something in them I keep in a separated box.

Regarding using binders for the negative storage...

(I am assuming that 'binder' means the same thing in US-English as it does in English - a stiff spine and covers, with several snap-close rings to hold pages in place).

Binders take up a lot of room and are not usually dustproof, but archival document filing boxes (acid free card, no glue, stainless metal fittings) can be filled with flat neg-pages, stored three deep on their long side and have plenty of space upon which to write references to their contents. Logical structure and a search-catalogue can best be arranged on a computer, or even with a card index if you don't trust electronic data. This packaging is far more protective of the contents, and more space efficient too.

For an unrestricted space and cost budget there are systems that are more protective, of course.

Yes, it is worth keeping them.

I keep them all, I scan them all, I delete the scans of the ones that aren't so great. Those crappy shots I took around the house and backyard last Friday evening to test my CZJ Flektogon, and then stand developed in Rodinal, I kept them too. They severely lack sharpness as does anything I've ever stand developed but I kept them anyway, now I need to go out and properly test that lens.

Another reason I tend to keep 'em all is that I shoot mostly roll film and it is a PITA to cut one frame out of a short strip and wind up with a bunch of oddball chunks of film. With sheet film where each shot is an individual entity I might be less possessive!

MartinP said:

Regarding using binders for the negative storage...

(I am assuming that 'binder' means the same thing in US-English as it does in English - a stiff spine and covers, with several snap-close rings to hold pages in place).

Binders take up a lot of room and are not usually dustproof, but archival document filing boxes (acid free card, no glue, stainless metal fittings) can be filled with flat neg-pages, stored three deep on their long side and have plenty of space upon which to write references to their contents. Logical structure and a search-catalogue can best be arranged on a computer, or even with a card index if you don't trust electronic data. This packaging is far more protective of the contents, and more space efficient too.

For an unrestricted space and cost budget there are systems that are more protective, of course.

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Also if you need a binder, consider boiled rice or kaopectate.

About a year ago I found some paper negatives from 1979, I was 11, that never made me happy, but realized the problem was that in 1979, not knowing better, I'd printed them through the paper base! No wonder they were unacceptably soft, even for pinhole camera images. I can't begin to do justice to how satisfying it was to print them correctly 36 years later and see better what I saw in 1979.

Somewhere I have some 1983 or 1984 negatives of some special bonsai specimens as well as some portraits I'd dearly love to find---I'm pretty sure they are in a box somewhere. Those were made with my beloved OM-1, still one of my favorite cameras.

Since returning to film a few years ago I've kept films pretty much no matter what. I was really upset to learn that Walmart will process film (c-41) but will not return the negatives.

Fr. Mark said:

About a year ago I found some paper negatives from 1979, I was 11, that never made me happy, but realized the problem was that in 1979, not knowing better, I'd printed them through the paper base! No wonder they were unacceptably soft, even for pinhole camera images. I can't begin to do justice to how satisfying it was to print them correctly 36 years later and see better what I saw in 1979.

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Wow!

Aside from some commercial work where the negative weren't required I keep all my negatives. That recently proved important when I was visited and asked what other photos I'd taken back in the late 1980's for a project exhibited first in 1989. It turns out my photos are the only remaining evidence of what's since been lost, so what was unimportant from an art point of view is important as documentary evidence.

Ian

RobC said:

you never know, you may decide in a few years that you want to print something from them.

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+1 on that-I've felt the same way so many times. It's fantastic when you discover a lovely picture of ,say, your youngest sister you shot in 1986 or whenever.