Tossing Negatives After They've Been Scanned

[gary mulder]

The average time a viewer is willing to look at your photos is 4 seconds per image with a maximum of 15 images. Choose wisely what you want to show. Kill your precious darlings.

 

[perkeleellinen]

Whenever we talk about this, it reminds me of a letter sent into a UK photography magazine (Practical Photography?) in the mid 1990s. In the published letter a chap enthused about scanning all his negatives so he could view them on his new home computer and of course, he could then toss all the negatives. I've often wondered about that chap. I don't know what sort of scanning machines consumers used in the '90s but maybe he came to regret not being able to scan better as technology improved. It's like tossing a negative after making a print, one day you might want to have another go at it.

 

[gbroadbridge]

. I don't know what sort of scanning machines consumers used in the '90s but maybe he came to regret not being able to scan better as technology improved. It's like tossing a negative after making a print, one day you might want to have another go at it.

The problem is, I doubt scanning or copying technology will improve much from this point on.
There seems to be little point.

 

[benderscameracorner]

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.

True... but how many house fires have you suffered versus storage media failures in your lifetime?

But yes, true archival does mean multiple copies in multiple places, regardless of the format. And maybe it's time for a bigger fireproof box for our important docs ;-)

The main reason I keep my negatives is because I may want to re-scan them if better digitizing methods become more available / affordable. Some of my early slides have been digitized a third time.

This. A lot of my early stuff was scanned with a circa-2001 Plustek that I think was 1800dpi - all I could afford back then. Seemed OK at the time, B&W and slide was fine but manually inverting colour negs in Photoshop 5.5 was, ah, a little hit and miss.

Going through and rescanning at 20MP+ with a decent DSLR/macro-bellows setup, and the joys of Negative Lab Pro... well it's like seeing the images anew all over again.

I do tend to agree with another poster though, we're probably not going to see the same kind of improvement again in another 20 years. Only so much detail you can pull out of a typical 35mm frame... medium/large format is a different matter...

 

[runswithsizzers]

The problem is, I doubt scanning or copying technology will improve much from this point on.
There seems to be little point.

Probably true, but...

While the state-of-the-art scanning technology may not improve much in the near future, how many are scanning with state-of-the-art technology?

I may never be able to afford very many drum scans, but today, I can afford to buy better hardware than I could when I first started scanning film. I am getting more resolution and sharpness now by copying film with a 16MP digital camera than I was using a film scanner from 2002. And now digital cameras have 40MP, and more. Will 40MP result in better camera scans than 16MP? I don't know, but if it does, I'll still have my negatives in case I need them.

So if your scans are all done with drum scanners, or whatever is considered to be the gold standard today, then you may have no need to rescan your negatives in the foreseeable future. (Personally, I've never been very good at foreseeing the future. ;-)

 

[Hassasin]

Tossing negatives after scanning or at any point in life is simply insanity. I think only those who lost it, without having any say, can fully appreciate this.