Folding Up

An Interesting Dilemma

I haven’t posted anything to this blog for some time, but I thought this problem might be of interest of some who follow and perhaps you may have some words of wisdom you could offer.

About 18 months ago my father died after a long battle against cancer. Just before his death he entrusted me with the care/management of his photographic equipment – he appreciated they would need to be disposed of, but felt that I might be the most suited person to deal with this sympathetically. Most of the equipment is film based – there are 3 TLRs, an old Contax, an old Leica, and Pentax and Canon cameras. No particular dilemma here – I shall put a film through each and decide how to proceed.

The real dilemma is with regard to the 1000s of negatives he amassed. What’s the best way of dealing with them? I could scan them all but I dread to think of the cost of doing that (either financially or time wise, or both). I could just file them for future generations, but as we all know, negatives have a limited appeal to most people, so they would likely go the same way as old cassettes and floppy discs.

I’ve grabbed a couple of boxes of negatives which seemed to be without real identity – there were loose negs, and individual negs in individal paper negative sleeves, and numbers of negs in a single negative sleeve. My first step has been to scan the ‘people’ pictures – as these are likely to be of most interest. Most of the first tranche are 120 negatives and are family pictures so I feel there is particular value in what I’m doing. It’s a bit of a cumbersome job – as individual negatives it takes time to mount them in the appropriate scan tray (designed to take strips of 3 x 120 negs) – and it’s are bind to get the negs out of the sleeves – so much so that I’m now ripping the things open – with the view of storing the negs in a more accessible way – clear plastic slide archival negative sleeves.

As a keen photographer myself, I can’t help wonder what impact this job is going to have on time I have more my own photograhy.

—Stephen G. Hipperson—

Gap in the Fence

Almost inviting me to explore but unfortunately it’s on private land.

35mm, FP4, Rodinal

—Stephen—

AS VE WLY

A series of part signs, perhaps?

35mm, FP4, Rodinal

—Stephen–

The Roman Column

A night time shot of ‘The Roman Column’ which has been re-erected near to where it was found near the York Minster in York. Apparently, it was one of the columns of the Basilica that stood thereabouts, long before the Minster was built. The column was found by the foundations of the Minster during a archaeological dig in the late 1960s.

35mm, FP3, Rodinal

—Stephen—