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[OM] Re: OT Way pre Oly photos

Subject: [OM] Re: OT Way pre Oly photos
From: Andrew McPhee <macca@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 13 Nov 2004 17:15:38 +1100
At 06:08 PM 10/11/2004 -0800, Moose wrote:
>I've mentioned before that I plan to scan the old family albums, both
>from when I was a kid and when my kids were young. A lengthy project,
>but I'm in no big hurry.

Great idea Moose, future generations will thank you!

I am going to do a similar project. I have 200+ b&w photos (no negs) of my 
ancestors taken between 1875 and 1960, the earliest are tintypes and 
albumen process, most are gelatin-silver.  After I've worked my way through 
that lot I'll start on the hundreds of color slides and prints taken 
between 1960 and the present day.  As you say, projects like this are 
time-consuming - I'm thinking this is going to take me years to complete!

I already have all the old photos scanned for use on my genealogy website 
http://mixedbunch.com/ but I am going to re-scan them all for this new "CD 
photo album" project.  I want to give copies of the CD's to family members 
and to offer them to overseas relatives via the website, my aim is to share 
the enjoyment these photos bring and to disseminate copies of them so 
they'll be preserved long after the original images have faded away.

Which brings me to the point...how to archive these scans properly so 
they'll be accessible to future generations, here's a few thoughts I have 
had, feel free to comment.

On each CD I envisage having about 100 images.  Each image will be 
reproduced in different file formats and/or sizes depending on its use.

Firstly, there will be a copy of the original scan. This will be saved as a 
full-res BMP or maybe PNG file.
Secondly, there will be a high-res "retouched" image suitable for printing, 
this will be saved as a JPG.
Thirdly, there will be the "viewing image" for use in the CD photo album - 
a resized 72dpi JPG copy of the "retouched" image.

To put this all together into an album I will not be using any proprietary 
photo album software, I'll be making the album using basic HTML web 
pages.  I'll also be including software such as a web browser and a 
graphics viewing/editing program.

Hopefully this photo album CD will be usable for many years to come but as 
operating systems and file formats change I'll have to redo it periodically 
(and leave instructions for my children to do this as well).



>Anyway, in most cases, I have the original negatives for the prints. My
>mother carefully put the negs in her album behind the prints. All on old
>fashioned acid free pages.

Of course it is still important to preserve the original photographs (and 
negs), your mother was very wise to choose the way she did it!  My 
collection came to me loose, 'filed' in a shoebox, a much preferable way 
that other collections I've seen that are stuck into those horrible 
sticky-paged albums, IMHO whoever invented those things should be hung, 
drawn and quartered.

I am currently pondering a safe, archival way to file the original photos 
and slides that I have.  I am leaning towards mounting each photo onto a 
piece of acid-free matte board using photo corners then filing them 
(interleaved with acid-free tissue) in an archival box. Fortunately most of 
the photos have names/dates/places written on the reverse which I will 
transcribe onto the back of the mount.




>So I just tried film vs. neg scans of a
>couple of photos. The first try of a 6x7 B&W neg from when I was a month
>old only showed a rather subtle difference between scans of the neg and
>the contact print, mostly just a little better tonality and a tiny bit
>more detail. The second test, of a shot of me and my brothers when I was
>9, is quite a different story. The old color print is pretty faded, but
>beyond that, quite soft. The 6x6 color neg is both much sharper with
>more detail, but rather unfaded. So here's a pic of a young Moose
><http://www.moosemystic.net/Gallery/Comp02.jpg>. I already had a camera
>by then, a Brownie Hawkeye TLR. I don't recall what was used for this shot.

This is certainly an eye-opener, the comparison is like night and day isn't 
it?  As I mentioned, I don't have many negs but lots of color slides. Most 
are Kodachrome which look as good as the day they were taken but some are 
Ansochrome or other generic brands which have not stood up so well and have 
faded.  I've scanned a few and have been surprised at the quality of scan I 
achieved, playing with the levels in Photoshop has brought many of the 
faded ones back to some sort of decent color scale.

Andrew McPhee 


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