Tossing Negatives After They've Been Scanned

The teacher (who had zero photo background going into this) who took over the photo program of a colleague of mine, a few years ago, does 99.9% digital. One project is film based, and they do make tiny 5x7 prints at the end of the unit. I was talking with him the other day, and he told me that he is saving a heap of money not having to buy negative sleeves for the students... instead, he has instructed them to just toss the negatives. I was speechless!

You know the economy is doing badly when not buying negative sleeves amounts to saving "a heap of money"...

Yes Andy, when I sent some E-6 to a lab in New York last year to be developed, they were pushing me to discard the film and only keep the scans as a cost saving measure, and said that's what a lot of people did. I decided against using labs from that point forward - they weren't giving me better results than home development anyway.

This lab charged $2 per roll to sleeve your film, plus the shipping to send them to you. Nothing all that bad. But there's plenty of new film shooters who only want the digital files, apparently.

Alex Benjamin said:

You know the economy is doing badly when not buying negative sleeves amounts to saving "a heap of money"...

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Canada's economy is doing quite well, considering...
The district has been clamping down heavy on electives that cost a lot to run. As soon as I retired, the darkroom was gutted. Nothing remains. They even removed the revolving door. The teacher who took over the program is a foods teacher...a FOODS teacher! He also has zero background in photography, but knows enough about using a DSLR, and that is good enough by the admin. Needless to say, I am very disappointed. The other program that is very costly is ceramics. It is safe. Why? Because it's a place that can easily take in special needs kids.
But at the end of the day, it's not mine anymore... I have to let it go.
Sooo glad I retired!

loccdor said:

Yes Andy, when I sent some E-6 to a lab in New York last year to be developed, they were pushing me to discard the film and only keep the scans as a cost saving measure, and said that's what a lot of people did. I decided against using labs from that point forward - they weren't giving me better results than home development anyway.

This lab charged $2 per roll to sleeve your film, plus the shipping to send them to you. Nothing all that bad. But there's plenty of new film shooters who only want the digital files, apparently.

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I was in my local camera shop, and a young lady was buying a roll of 35mm colour film. The clerk asked her if she wanted the negatives back, and I cut in, "get the negatives back!. You will be glad you did". So she did. The clerk later told me that it's rare for customers to ask for them back, and when they do, they are not cut, but rolled back and stuffed back inside the plastic film container!

Andrew O'Neill said:

The teacher (who had zero photo background going into this) who took over the photo program of a colleague of mine, a few years ago, does 99.9% digital. One project is film based, and they do make tiny 5x7 prints at the end of the unit. I was talking with him the other day, and he told me that he is saving a heap of money not having to buy negative sleeves for the students... instead, he has instructed them to just toss the negatives. I was speechless!

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Why would you want the negatives after they’ve been scanned??? What’s the scandal. After 40 years of shooting film I start going back, scanning them, and then pitching them. Still have a few thousand to go. Now when I develop film I give the negs a very brief wash, scan and pitch.

The shop near me Wilson's told me that it's younger customers do not want their negatives, once processed and scanned the vast majority of negatives are tossed. Not sure if sold to recycle company, most film is color with not as much silver and black and white.

This is what should concern Us, not the price of silver. We are 2 generations removed from flash bulbs and cubes, no one knows what they are. Andy, when I watched your little video, when you shut down your classroom for the last time, I thought what a great facility. Now trashed.
I never load any digital camera files to "the cloud" these images lay trapped perpetually.

Alas Babylon

beemermark said:

Why would you want the negatives after they’ve been scanned??? What’s the scandal. After 40 years of shooting film I start going back, scanning them, and then pitching them. Still have a few thousand to go. Now when I develop film I give the negs a very brief wash, scan and pitch.

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Why shoot film? That's just nuts.

Schools will spend tons of money on completely unnecessary things - and neglect the things that matter. I work for one, they never stop doing this, it's almost comical at this point, you just have to laugh. The high levels of administration are perpetually out of touch and only care about their perception and image for the years they'll be in charge.

My school a few years back converted a very large room we used to meet in to a place for kids to play video games. Bought a hundred high end computers for it. Then a few years later they announced they were moving us off-campus because they want to use the office we work in for other things. They're expected to kick us to the new location in a year or two. It was a huge drama, our vice president resigned over it, we lost many of our most competent employees who had simply had enough.

He obviosly has no understanding about the physical integrity of film.

Consider the enonomy if you toss the film then why shoot film to begin with????????

Andrew O'Neill said:

I was in my local camera shop, and a young lady was buying a roll of 35mm colour film. The clerk asked her if she wanted the negatives back, and I cut in, "get the negatives back!. You will be glad you did". So she did. The clerk later told me that it's rare for customers to ask for them back, and when they do, they are not cut, but rolled back and stuffed back inside the plastic film container!

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Placing the rolled film back into the original can was common in 1950s and 1960s. The good: prorects the film from moisture. The bad: the film becomes very curly, and you risk scratching.

I still have 10s of my dad's rolls in a tin box. Sigh, it is time to purge.

As a retired computer sysadmin, I do not place much reliance on computer hardware - I do multiple backups because I know these things fail. Never mind the cloud (somebody else's computer) issues. Digital storage is not cheap if you add it up. Images take up a lot of digital storage space.

But barring fire, flood, or critters, my negatives will be around to annoy the executors of my estate!

A negative is cheap (you paid to get it already), compact, and tangible.

Andrew O'Neill said:

The clerk later told me that it's rare for customers to ask for them back, and when they do, they are not cut, but rolled back and stuffed back inside the plastic film container!

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Actually, the "uncut" part is not a bad idea. In the past, I have used print file sleeves which are made for four frames, five frames, or six frames. I'd rather cut them myself to fit whatever file system I am using. Of course, preventing dust and scratches is important, too.

beemermark said:

Why would you want the negatives after they’ve been scanned??? What’s the scandal. After 40 years of shooting film I start going back, scanning them, and then pitching them. Still have a few thousand to go. Now when I develop film I give the negs a very brief wash, scan and pitch.

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I assume you are just trolling us now, right?

Andrew O'Neill said:

Canada's economy is doing quite well, considering...
The district has been clamping down heavy on electives that cost a lot to run. As soon as I retired, the darkroom was gutted. Nothing remains. They even removed the revolving door. The teacher who took over the program is a foods teacher...a FOODS teacher! He also has zero background in photography, but knows enough about using a DSLR, and that is good enough by the admin. Needless to say, I am very disappointed. The other program that is very costly is ceramics. It is safe. Why? Because it's a place that can easily take in special needs kids.
But at the end of the day, it's not mine anymore... I have to let it go.
Sooo glad I retired!

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Andy I'm sure the economy of both Coquitlam and Montreal isn't all that different
A sad story you're telling about education in the lower mainland....
BTW Are the students making darkroom prints? or digital? If the latter, then why even have them use film?

runswithsizzers said:

I assume you are just trolling us now, right?

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I've known minimalists who like to uncomplicate their life by not keeping much of anything, so it's not outside the realm of possibility as a philosophy.

Its a whole new world out there! Most people taking photos will have literally no use of colour negatives. They will not print them on RA4 and unless they invest heavily in a scanning setup the scans the lab offer will be better than anything they could do at home.

If shipping negatives back home makes each pic $1.50 instead of $1 that makes a world of difference to those used to digital cameras where each picture costs nothing.

loccdor said:

Yes Andy, when I sent some E-6 to a lab in New York last year to be developed, they were pushing me to discard the film and only keep the scans as a cost saving measure, and said that's what a lot of people did. I decided against using labs from that point forward - they weren't giving me better results than home development anyway.

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Throwing out E6?!? Negatives have the hieroglyphic inverted color and orange mask, but slide film itself really shows the point (pun intended). Also, I find that most slide film scans do not have the same oomph as the film itself. Obviously, but I only see some scans from high level equipment that very much looks like a reproduction of the originall.

For color I use labs, C41 can be cheap and still runs standardised and well in big labs. 4-5€ for the negs and I skip batching up plus the time of DIY development. Then minilab chemistry is not of the simplified kits. E6 is a bit harder, I restarted shooting some of it, but it's about a roll here and there. Many labs are running smaller volume E6 with Jobos, but seemingly with the 6 bath kits so can be decent still.

mshchem said:

Why shoot film? That's just nuts.

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Despite being young (30), I have learned from more classic sources and always understood that the negative is the master original to keep archived. Even if these are not to be used much again, it is to be archived. I did sadly lose a few due to lab and post issues however... Did have the scans in that case, but still. As others have pointed, labs themselves see the trend of abandoned negatives.

And even more black and white with the viable and easy printing. Heck, I think there was a photo student in our photo club that tossed the BW negs after scanning when we have a perfect darkroom that I pointed to as he was scanning on the Epson Flatbed. Oh my.

Prest_400 said:

Despite being young (30), I have learned from more classic sources and always understood that the negative is the master original to keep archived. Even if these are not to be used much again, it is to be archived. I did sadly lose a few due to lab and post issues however... Did have the scans in that case, but still. As others have pointed, labs themselves see the trend of abandoned negatives.

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I agree with everything in your post especially about slides and b&w film. But I do not see needing colour negs in future beyond the benefits as a physical backup.

Regardless my preferred lab will keep negs on file for a year incase customers come back for them.

Andrew O'Neill said:

The teacher (who had zero photo background going into this) who took over the photo program of a colleague of mine, a few years ago, does 99.9% digital. One project is film based, and they do make tiny 5x7 prints at the end of the unit. I was talking with him the other day, and he told me that he is saving a heap of money not having to buy negative sleeves for the students... instead, he has instructed them to just toss the negatives. I was speechless!

Click to expand...

It's really not a surprise coming from a 0 photo background teacher really.

One aspect of film photography that doesn't get talked about enough is its permanency, archive-ability and recoverability.

An image exists, physically, in a tangible medium, that - importantly - cost real money to produce. Each image thus has a real, tangible financial value, beyond whether or not it's actually an 'image worth keeping' . Therefore, whether you store it neatly in acid-free sleeves in organised folders in a humidity-controlled room, or shove the negs in a shoebox in the back of your wardrobe, there is a natural tendency to hang onto them.

Or at least I would have thought so. Kids these days... /s

I wouldn't consider myself pedantic or a natural hoarder, but I have the negatives and slides for literally every roll of film I've shot in my life (save for my absolute first roll of 110 I shot when I was 10, but I still have the original prints) rolling back to 1995. They're all in a plastic tub, the same one I've had since 1998, some stored with some care, a lot still in the original paper envelopes that came with the prints. While 50%+ of its contents are unremarkable images of a young bloke learning the craft, many of those negatives have been dug out with relative ease to be reprinted or rescanned in the years since, as needed. That tub's been dragged through no less than 17 address changes in three states in 25+ years, even after I had basically abandoned film from mid 2000s to the mid 2010s.

During the same period of time, I hate to think how many digital photos I've lost. I know my iPhoto library was in the tens of thousands already by 2005, and while most of those images were merely snaps taken with an Olympus compact or early phone/PDA cameras, there are important life moments that I'm sure have been lost through a mix of many dying computers, failing hard drives and rotting CD-Rs/DVD-Rs.

Many years ago I watched a presentation by recording engineer/producer Steve Albini (I'll try and find it online later). For those unaware, Albini was responsible for the production of Nirvana's In Utero, PJ Harvey's Rid Of Me, early Pixies stuff and his own work with Big Black amongst hundreds of other albums, and was a staunch champion of straight up recordings on analogue tape as the digital tape-based and later hard-drive/computer based audio systems (DAWs) became the norm.

The concept of sticking with analogue 'because it sounds better' was by no means new, but Albini, surprisingly, stated his primary rationale for sticking with expensive, maintenance-heavy 24 trk analogue decks was archival. To heavily paraphrase from memory:

"These recordings I make are in many cases the only real evidence that a band existed. I owe it to them to ensure the recordings remain listenable into the future. The early digital tape systems used metal oxide tape that's now falling apart, recorded on machines that are no longer made and supported and are falling apart, and those recordings are being lost. Computer systems have come and gone, hard drives die. Yet I can take an analogue tape recorded 40-50 years ago, and play it back. Maybe it needs a little time in the oven to avoid ferric oxide loss, maybe there's some loss of high end fidelity... or maybe it'll sound better because it's being played back on equipment much newer and capable than what it was recorded on back in the day... but I can play you back something you can hear."

I feel there's a lot of parallel with photography in that. Yes, prints, negatives and slides certainly aren't impervious to damage and decay over time... but even with a damaged piece of film, you can still tell what it is... and it can be rescanned at the highest resolution available of the day and digitally cleaned up with the best tools of the day.

If digital files aren't saved in three different copies in three different places... one scratched CD-R, one cup of coffee over a laptop or one errant OS update... it's all gone.

So yeah... if you do nothing else... put your negs into a box ;-)

I don’t want to get typecast as an inveterate film-disposer, I keep all negatives I develop myself.

benderscameracorner said:

If digital files aren't saved in three different copies in three different places... one scratched CD-R, one cup of coffee over a laptop or one errant OS update... it's all gone.

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But this argument holds for film too, one burst pipe, flood or fire and poof! Those somewhat flammable negs (still better than nitrocellulose) are ashes or sodden beyond recovery. How many here make duplicates of every roll or sheet and store them in another place?

I just think this argument is wielded rhetorically more than anything else. It has merit but its overstated.

All the most important digital images are saved on film. I'm not sure how RGB channels? Then kept in a former salt mine.