Welcome to that wonderfully busy/exciting/depressing time of year - late spring, when kids get out of school, we get into and out of college/med school/law school (along with seeing friends off), and everyone else has paid their IRS dues and can now work purely for themselves. It’s been absorbing…but the dust has settled and there’s time to put some work into fun projects.

One of those projects (the all-consuming one) is getting ready for release - a new photo gallery. All consuming, you ask? Yes, answer I. Digital imaging is a joy, but it is also a ridiculously easy way to drain hours on end. In this case, the drain has been in scanning a few thousand frames of film and working out storage systems (at around 1.5gb per roll of film, it’s nontrivial). The joy, however, has been seeing 30 year old negatives come to life in a way that they never have before. It’s one thing to see older photo albums with faded prints, it’s something else entirely to scan the negative and see a picture of yourself as a newborn looking as though it’d been taken yesterday.

I’d like to take this opportunity for a quick rant:

Please don’t touch your negatives (if you have slides, you already know how to handle film). Your gooey skin will ooze all over the film, and the film will happily absorb it - but it’ll hang onto it (welcome to preposition hell) for the next few decades. Fingerprints are excruciating to get rid of in photoshop.

Please don’t throw away your negatives. I was really surprised when I discovered that quite a few people toss negatives after getting prints. It’s a shame, because with digital imaging we can directly scan the original film and take a look at what was actually captured, rather than what the photo lab thought you should see.

Computer monitors are far better for viewing photos than prints on photographic paper (the best experience is viewing slides on a light table, followed by slides projected). Paper has a limited range between black and white, so the lab usually just makes the people in the picture use up all of that range. Everything more than a bit darker than the people goes to black, everything more than a bit lighter goes to white. If you’ve ever wondered why the sky in all of your pictures is pure white rather than (sky) blue, this is it (side note - it’s also something that happens with point and shoot digital cameras - the software will push the contrast high because it gives the picture some “snap”, at the expense of throwing away a lot of the scene). Scanning a negative is the only way to get the full story.

Take a look at the image to see a comparison between a print scanned on a flatbed scanner, and the negative run through a film scanner. Can you tell which is which?

….okay that wasn’t a quick rant. But I feel better having gotten a bit of that out of my system.

Photos. Soon.