How long will those precious slides last before they fade? Those
negatives? Those B&W prints? Those color prints (by whatever
long-forgotten process they were made)? Will that digital file be
readable by anything 20 years from now?
This has been discussed here before, sometimes to the ccompaniment
of moaning and groaning and whining about irreplaceable pictures
that have faded away, turned to magenta, or grown fungus,
frequently occasioned by slanderous commentary regarding various
emulsions and/or processes. But hearken up here! I have some new
observations and conclusions, together with illustrative visual
aids in support of my hypothesis at the end.
While digging through stuff in the basement, I uncovered a long-
forgotten box, about 18 inches square, in the farthest, darkest
corner, at the bottom of a stack of similar boxes, that contained
some of the remnants of my long lost photographic past. Most of
my pre-1969 stuff was lost in a house fire, but this old, dusty
and slightly crushed cardboard box contained a bunch of negatives,
slides and prints from the '50s and '60s. Funny how stuff put
away in attics and basements is soon forgotten, and this box had,
until yesterday, been sitting in that corner, untouched, for at
least 25 years.
It contained a couple of hundred B&W prints, most on what I guess
now to be either Kodabromide (my favorite) or Medalist paper;
about 200 six-frame strips of B&W negatives in glassine envelopes,
and a shoe box half full of slides in a dozen stacks of
approximately 40 each, corralled by pieces of cardboard apparently
cut from another shoe box. No sign of archival materials here!
The prints and B&W negatives looked pretty much like they would've
25 years ago when they were stored, and probably just about like
they did 40 or 50 years ago when they were made. But it's the
slides I want to talk about, because, except for color prints,
they seem to be the most perishable, or at least the most bitched
about, of our photographic media.
Half the slides are Kodachrome, the old Kodachrome, the ASA 10
stuff, from long before K-2, K-X, K-64, et al. They look
absolutely perfect. There are a few Agfachrome slides, and they
look pretty good, too, although some may be just a teeny bit
washed out. The rest are Ektachrome, and if they have faded or
deteriorated in any way, I can't tell it. Among these, I found a
couple of super slides. (For the youngsters, that's a size, not
an evaluation: 4x4cm trannies were called "super slides.")
Anyway, one of these is a picture of my maternal grandmother taken
with a Yashica 44 in 1956, and it has to be from one of the first
rolls of Ektachrome I ever developed with a do-it-yourself E-2
kit. This means that the procedure would have been carried out by
a 15-year-old kid, with the film being loaded into a Nikor tank in
the bathroom, with a towel stuffed under the door to keep the
light out, and then the processing done in the kitchen, probably
after the dinner dishes had been dried and put away.
Considering it was not stored under anything approaching archival
conditions and was processed in a manner that definitely wasn't
state of the art, amazingly, this slide looks just fine and dandy
now nearly 50 years later. The link below will take you to a scan
of the slide in question, and, underneath it, another picture of
my grandmother, with her sister, as a 19-year-old college student
in 1901. (This hundred-year-old photograph might teach some of us
a thing or two about portrait lighting.)
Comparing the two photographs taken about 50 years apart, it is
obvious that no matter how quickly our photographic materials may
fade away, we fade away a hell of a lot faster. Take that thought
with you as you lay yourself down to sleep tonight and consider
whether you really, really are all that concerned about your
vacation pictures from last summer maybe turning to dust by 2104.
After all these observations, the only conclusion I can come to is
that "cool and dark" are at least part of the secret to archival
storage. I'm not sure what the shoe box may have contributed, but
obviously sulfur-free paper and expensive archival plastic
materials had nothing to do with it.
Me? I'm just trying to stay cool and in the dark, too. Maybe
it'll keep me from fading away too soon. So far, so good.
http://home.att.net/~hiwayman/wsb/html/view.cgi-photos.html-.html
Walt
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
"A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing
than he needs." -- Mark Twain (defining the cause of Zuikoholism a
century ago)
The olympus mailinglist olympus@xxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe: mailto:olympus-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe
To contact the list admins: mailto:olympusadmins@xxxxxxxxxx?subject="Olympus
List Problem"
|