Old School, New School: photography

[furtech]

A friend of mine just uploaded some great pictures taken years ago. These were taken with a film-type camera (as opposed to a digital camera), so he had to pull out boxes, probably sort hundreds of pictures, cull them, scan and then upload them. The result, though, was that his friends got to see pictures of him taken years ago-- really neat.

Is there an easy way to get one's negative/prints scanned and organized? If not, then -there's- a product that needs inventing. Some device that you can feed in a stack of negatives and the device will clean and load the negative strips, scan the images and date them (most film negatives of the last 30 years did have processing dates imprinted on them).

Anyone know of something like this? Or a service? Probably the step that I hate most is the cleaning/scanning part: you can't just pull negatives out and scan them-- any lint of dust on the neg will ruin the result. Getting that off takes a few minutes each...and even then doesn't guarantee that schmutz won't attach itself in the short time between opening the scanner and dropping the negative in.

It's almost like photography was just "invented" in the last ten years if you go by what's on the archive sites like Flickr and Photobucket.

I have boxes of pictures and negatives that I doubt I'll ever get around to manually scanning.

Comments

[didjiman.livejournal.com]

A number of services do it for about 30 cents per neg. They usually ship your stuff to India and even do color correction.

Dust is actually not a huge problem as most of the better scanners have "dust removal" features. It uses the IR channel so it works quite well. B&W or Kodachrome is another matter.

I still shoot film some of the times, especially B&W now.

[oats-a-plenty.livejournal.com]

I was going to say, there are services that you can pay to have this done. Being inherently female, I love non-digital photo albums and such. There's something about a picture being a tangible object that makes it better.

[furtech.livejournal.com]

I love photo albums too: I even collect them (other people's albums, from Ebay and garage sales). If only I was organized enough to put them together properly. Some people are -really- good at this! *envy*

[furtech.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem is quantity: I have probably have in the neighborhood of 2000 negative strips that I would like to at least get digitized so that I can sort them out.

The cost isn't as much a consideration (as long as the quality is sufficiently high) as is the inconvenience: I would like to be able to scan them by roll of film (usually about 5-8 strips of 4-5 pictures each), so that I can just replace them in the storage box. If there was a service that I could trust to send a huge, disorganized box of packets of pictures and negatives that they would replace into their packages (which are already crudely labeled), that would be ideal. I kind of doubt such a thing exists-- they probably want the negs at least packed into pages.

If there was some device I could buy or rent that sat on the counter beside me that I could feed strips of negs into on my own time: perfect!

[oats-a-plenty.livejournal.com]

Crocuta tells me this gadget is pretty good for the price:

http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/consumer/consDetail.jsp?oid=53540925&ref=r0302EWb4B&s_kwcid=epson%20perfection%204490|3084554592&gclid=CJjHkuj_u50CFQ0aawod9Cm3iw