Looking back at old negatives

Do you sometimes look at old negatives and see some qualities in them that you did not notice when you first viewed them? I sometimes do and am surprised I didn’t bother to print them at the time. Perhaps an historic viewpoint is quite different from looking at an image with a fresh viewpoint.

Isn't this part of the fun. I rarely print more than 4-6 from each film which leaves plenty of discoveries and challenges for another day.

Yes I do and experienced a creepy experience. I was looking at an old proof sheet with an otherwise unremarkable image of an old, derelict church. On close inspection a ghostly face was watching me from a church window. The church was in the middle of nowhere so, a revenant, a vagrant, what? I totally missed this when I took the photo. So an unremarkable picture became a remarkable one.

dinosaurs

When I was a nipper -- about 1947 -- I took a great photo of a steam locomotive puffing out black smoke and looking like it was going 90 mph. The camera was a lowly Brownie Reflex (127 film) and the engine was, in fact, going quite slow trying to get up speed. These days those steam engines are dinosaurs and the photo looks better than ever.

I do it all the time!

Jeff

One of the first portraits I took with 4x5 didn't impress me when I first looked at the negative. I didn't bother printing it. Later, I learned Pt/Pd printing. I came back to this negative because it had good contrast and ended up printing what became one of my favorites.

I'm going back through negatives from about 1986 onwards, that was when my photography changed direction very significantly. (Essentially I switched from more commercial work to personal projects).

For about 8 years I had a burst of extreme productivity shooting mostly large format but also a lot of 35mm images alongside. I had so many projects on the go and really only finished and exhibited 2 from that period. Now looking back as I'm digitising negatives for probable publication I'm finding many images I've never printed, they didn't fit with the overall concept or I didn't feel they were strong enough at the time.

Some negatives while never printed I mentally catalogued at the shooting stage for possible inclusion in future projects, now these are slowly coming together as I scour through my negative files and I', building up an idea of which to print in the darkroom. I'm usually doing negative scans as well for a number of reasons, cataloguing, online/web use, possible publication. I prefer a negative scan to scanning a Fibre based print the alternative is to make Glossy Resin Coated prints & scan them to achieve similar quality.

When I look at the 35mm negatives things are quite different as I have made very few prints from them, I've only included 2 prints from 35mm negatives in exhibition sets. I will be re-evaluating these separately with a view to producing a more documentary exhibition set of smaller prints.

Ian

I find that I need a lot a distance and time between taking a picture and printing it. I recently moved and had not developed any film in nearly a year. I had a mountain of them to process and I had completely forgotten what was on them. That time between taking and processing was equally valuable as my mind's eye had already forgotten, so when I saw the negative, the moment came back to me as a new one.

Then there's going over old negatives with a new and improved (hopefully) eye, idea, style and level of skill.

Distance in time is good.

mr rusty said:

Isn't this part of the fun. I rarely print more than 4-6 from each film which leaves plenty of discoveries and challenges for another day.

Click to expand...

maybe you shoot too much.don't shoot it unless you are willing to print it too.

I often look back over older negs to pick out something for a 'surprise' print. It seems that frequently I'll shoot several versions of almost-the-same shot (higher, lower, left, right, with/without some movement, changed depth-of-field etc. etc.) and sometimes I change my mind about the most appropriate one. Then there are the ones that didn't go 'well', such as the baby screaming and kicking after the first quiet shot for example, which became more meaningful years later when making a complete set of childhood-emotion pictures for the childs 18th. birthday. Time changes everything.

RalphLambrecht said:

maybe you shoot too much.don't shoot it unless you are willing to print it too.

Click to expand...

Aw, Ralph. Despite the smiley, film's cheap but time is money.

I think when I am developing a fresh roll of film, I'm inclined to view the images with an eye for what I saw when I took them.
When I revisit negatives later, I am looking at them with no expectations so I'm more open to what the capture shows rather than what I wanted to find originally