Barry said:
Finally finished scanning my first set of old negatives with my CoolScan V
ED. Very time consuming. Quality is good but I will still do some
additional processing. In my younger days, I was dumb enough to take some
pictures in 110 format. Geez are they bad. It isn't critical as I am
scanning for archiving memories, not trying to win any awards. However, the
lack of detail in these amazes me. Poor lighting seems to have really been
a problem. No detail in the distance either. Fortunately, only about
10-15% are in the 110 format. Rest are 35mm. I wonder if some of the 110
is degraded with time given how bad it is.
Probably degraded no more than the 35mm, they were just always crap to
begin with. There were only a couple of decent 110 cameras ever made,
eg. the delightful little Pentax system which still commands a very
respectable used price, despite lack of readily available film for it.
The vast majority of 110 cameras were crap with a capital F, fixed
defocus, ergonomics designed to maximise camera shake and little or no
exposure control. They sold because nobody wanted prints from them much
bigger than 3x5" and most were happy with poor quality prints even at
that size.
Now my question. How best to store the old negatives. Should I just wrap
them in a ziplock bag and forget it. Do I need to do more. They have just
been sitting in a box for the past 15-20 years. Hopefully I will never be
scanning them again but I still want to preserve them.
I always used to cut the film that I developed myself into 6 frame
strips, slid into pre-punched glassine sleeves and filed in A4 D-ring
binders. I then interleaved each sheet of negatives with a matching
chemically produced contact print. These days, most of the commercial
printers over here cut negs into strips of 4 and put these in sleeves
before returning them to you. These sleeves don't have prepunched
holes, so I stick them to something called a "Filefix" (product No. 8061
from a German company Durable Hunke & Jochheim at
http://www.durable.de/de/produkte/suche/index.html) which allows them to
be filed directly in a standard A4 binder. The Filefix is attached to
the open end of the sleeves, so that the negative strips don't fall out
of the binder when you move it.
I create a "contact sheet" automatically in Photoshop from scans of all
of the images in a directory using an automation script. This contact
sheet is then printed at 720ppi, the native resolution of my Epson
printer, which allows each image to be viewed fairly well with
magnification. You can get 10 rows of 4 slightly larger than real size
frames on each A4 page, with numbers below each frame and sufficient
space down the outer edge of the sheet to add descriptive text
associated with each row for future reference. I just add this as a
text layer to the final image before printing it or write it on by hand
later. A matching A4 file holds the CDs of the scans and the contact
master, again interleaved with a physical print of the contact sheet.
The CDs are numbered matching the file page and the frames stored on it
- usually about 4 CDs per roll. Both the negative file and the CD file
are date marked down the spine with the same information - each A4
binder of negatives has a matching A4 binder of CDs.
That way I can store the negatives away in a metal filing cabinet where
they are rarely disturbed, but keep the CD files more accessible and
find the relevant image quickly just by browsing the contact sheets. The
only time I should ever need to disturb the negatives is if one of the
CD is damaged and a file becomes unreadable. So far, touch wood, I have
never needed to, but I don't put labels on the CDs and only write on the
unrecordable section around the hub.
No doubt, in time, all of the CDs will be replaced with DVDs or another
higher density more reliable medium. However, keeping the original
negatives well away from the working scans CDs seems common sense.
