Printed a 46 year old negative

perkeleellinen

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Hello All,

That's me below, probably in Clacton, summer 1975, with my Mum and Gran. You'll notice my Mum, pregnant with my sister, is smoking. This is from a 46 year old Agfacolor CNS negative in (I think) 126 format. There's a few brown blotches on the negative but overall, not bad. My family threw out all their negatives years ago and I was very happy to find these at the back of an old film envelope. Processing was done by Boots - a UK high street drug store. Hand printed by me today on Fuji CA with Adox RA4 chemicals.

What's the oldest colour negative you've managed to print from?

 

koraks

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Looks quite well for a 46 year old (negative)!

Btw, you may have a problem with your enlarger setup with the apparent uneven illumination and falloff in the corners.
 

Don_ih

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perkeleellinen said:
What's the oldest colour negative you've managed to print from?
Click to expand...
I printed a couple of photos of my parents from some 127 negatives from 1966. It was very difficult to get the colour correct. I'm not very experienced doing colour enlarging and I was even less so, then. That was about 4 years ago, I think. Like you, my parents threw away all their negatives and I just happened to find these. It's a shame, too, since they shot a lot of 126 that got printed onto 3.5 x 5 - which seriously crops the image (often right in the middle of someone's face).
 

pentaxuser

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perkeleellinen said:
Hello All,

My family threw out all their negatives years ago

View attachment 270596
Click to expand...

Well done with a neg of that vintage It wasn't just your family that threw out all the negatives as most families did the same while very carefully trying to preserve one print from each of a few favourite negatives. It was like eating the vital seed potatoes for next year's harvest at Xmas dinner How stupid was that!

We are inclined to be shocked at the ignorance of the new generation when it comes to film matters these days but in reality a lot of those generations several decades ago were just as ignorant

pentaxuser
 

wiltw

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I sold off my darkroom stuff, I had not printed anything since the late 1990's. I have scanned some very old color negatives, 58 years old, some old B&W 54 years old and some color neg 43 years old...and they resulted in very nice images that seemed to mirror my memory of the original camera store processing!

The 58 year old shot taken in very late afternoon light...(yes, as a 12 year old I should have gotten the horizon level, but I didn't know better then)

 
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Dusty Negative

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Wonderful! You’ve just preserved something that would have likely been lost forever.
 

nickandre

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Thankfully my grandmother saved every single negative she ever took, as the family photographer. She sent me some black and white ones but I've been meaning to go through and catalog a bunch of this stuff -- I should see what she has in color negative. For most of the 60s she shot primarily black and white panatomic X along with slides on occasion, as she correctly understood that the color "wasn't very good" at the time. The fade resistance of some of the pre-1980s integrated tripack films was mediocre from what I understand.

I did recently unearth a trove of slides from my grandmother's wedding day back in 1959. I think they were anscochrome (some fading but correctable with software). It can be a bit difficult to recognize people who have aged 62 years since the picture.
 

Finny

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What a great memory! We also have lots of old negatives here from the 70s. Most of them, however, in bw.
But the biggest "drama" is that my mom threw away a whole cabinet full of old photos on glass plates a few years ago without telling us.... very sad!
Btw: great picture!
 
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