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Advice sought.
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My dad has recently moved from a house with lots of storage to an apartment with very little storage. He has at least 40 years worth of negatives including instamatic & kodak black and whites. My mum is encouraging him to get rid of them all!! Is there any point in him keeping them? He will probably never need to print any of them again. Just wondering what is the right thing to do.
Thanks!
Would be a shame to dump them. Could you take them? You might enjoy printing some in years to come to show your family etc.
I would keep them at all costs, you never know when in the future you may find yourself wishing to go searching through for memories :)
Thank you both for the advice. Is it possible, with it being the digital age etc., to get really old negatives printed? Myself and my dad are unsure if it is still possible. How would we go about finding someone to do this for us? He has most of the prints of all the negatives in question printed and in albums and I love nothing more than flicking through them and showing my young daughter pics of her great grandparents etc. Although, she finds some of my hairstyles throughout the ’70’s and ’80’s hilarious :D
It is possible, but I don’t know any specific vendors to suggest. Depending on the format, investing in a scanner to scan the negatives may be an option. I won’t claim scanning is not a pain at times, but it will net you a digital file that you can then print at any time in the future.
Also, as your dad already has the prints, if you are only interested in those images/ want prints now, perhaps you might consider just scanning in the prints, and having them printed. Any old flatbed scanner should suffice, if of course the prints to be scanned can be coerced from the albums before being returned :)
Lastly, if just quickly looking to find out what images are on negatives, scanning them in as a contact sheet on a flatbed scanner is possible, and will let you know very quickly what images you have, before deciding which of them to scan more properly for prints.
Good luck with whatever way you choose to go :)
Murchu’s advice on scanning them into a contact sheet is your best, quickest option. But keep them for sure.
It’s a tedious job trust me! When I worked with a motorsport agency I had to resheet hundreds of old negs so they could be scanned into contact sheets. It almost brought me to tears! But it lets you see what you have without doing a full scan (which takes time) & print which costs money.
Hi Karrie,
Just to follow up on my previous post, don’t wish to in any way dissuade you from one day wet printing them yourself, or having them wet printed by a lab, just laying out some scanning options.
Seeing what is on the negs before you scan them can be an onorous task, and the thought that there may be some sort of smartphone app, that will let you preview whats on the neg, by placing the camera over it, and the app then doing its bit inverting, etc, to give you a rough idea of the image thats it. Perhaps food for thought, to see whats quickly on the neg :)
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