MY FIRST CONTACT SHEET!

I thought I'd LONG ago lost several thousand (really!) of my earliest personal negs. I broke out the scanner I'd had long buried in a box and while looking for some earli-ER stuff to scan, I happened on an old 250-sheet fuji box. All my earliest stuff, including - the VERY first rolls of film I'd ever shot with ANY camera! (this was a Yashica my parents gave me for xmas one year).

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I'm QUITE excited about this. I'd like to go back and re-print some of it too. I scanned a few old things from my very first year doing photography - which was, ulp, 1982 or so... (actually two later shots from 86/87 slipped in - they're the ones on Kodak VPS & VHC).

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It'd be GREAT if we could post some more first contact sheets up here, too!

Great stuff! Looks like you had it from the start! Congratulations on the find!

Very nice of you to say, Kino. I appreciate it - but can't really take credit for it. I cheated. I spent ALL my time drawing (and a bit of painting, etc.) when I was a kid. And I forced myself to read all the books available to me. So the medium was sort of a natural for me. There are still some shots that I like. But there are a heck of a lot of "what the hell were you THINKING sorts of shots also"... which is the funny part. I edited out some of that more embarrassing stuff. But those are the shots that are sort of fun to look at, to my mind.

It's been about ten years since I thought it was gone - I'd just forgotten I'd transferred it out of a series of three ring binders into photo paper boxes...!

J

Actually - one alarming thing that I DID discover - was, in scanning these sheets of negs - that some of the C-41 had lost almost all it's color...! Unless my old scanner is way off... the negs look kind of wan, though! Especially the VHC (that was a film designed for intense color). I would expect a color SHIFT if anything... the ektacolor prints I have from the mid to late 80s still look quite good, despite a LITTLE bit of yellowing.

Color dyes are fugative; if you want to archive it, you have to do b&w color seps. Not an option many of us would consider, unless they have a huge body of color work...

Understandable - it's just that I really wouldn't expect this from film processed in 1986 or 87. Maybe from the 1950s... anybody else having this experience??

Hey, you did seem to have a running start! I wish my first contact sheet had as many keepers as that one.

Unfortunately, it took me a while before I figured out it was cheaper to make a contact sheet than printing them.