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

[mistahbojangles.livejournal.com]

I can look into it. I've never done this myself, but my father digitized a bunch of our old family photos through a service and the results were decent enough. I don't think the service he used did anything to improve upon what was physically presented, but the results were appealing.

[furtech.livejournal.com]

Does "decent" mean that there were no dust specks or lint on the scans and the resolution was high? I'm looking for something that will scan the negs into files that are at least the equivalent of a 10 megapixal digital picture, that replicates the original color and exposure.

Also, check to see how they require the negatives to be packed for them, especially if we are talking large (hundreds) of negative strips.

Thanks!

Examples

[mistahbojangles.livejournal.com]

I uploaded some example images that show a progression of the results from bad to good. It seems to me that the quality results depend greatly on the condition and quality of the film negative. The oldest photo example dates back to the late 1950's and shows warping in the negative surface, an aggressive red color cast, and a poor resolution of details despite the high quality scan performed. It looks as if this scan shows the limitations of the camera and film that created the photo in the first place rather than a poor performance of the scanning service:

http://www.toonfox.com/photos/film%20photo%20scans/42880032.JPG

The second photo shows lots of dots and pixel-ish looking elements in the shadowed faces, but the details are a lot cleaner in the sunlit areas. There's also some crud and disturbance in the upper left corner that's visible. This photo dates to around 1983 and probably was taken with a point-and-shoot camera:

http://www.toonfox.com/photos/film%20photo%20scans/42880035.JPG

The last photo is probably taken around 1974 using my father's SLR camera and shows excellent clarity all around probably because of the good lighting. There's some color and spotty weirdness appearing in the large black patch of the lamp post in the right side of the picture however, so that might be an indication of where the scanning process stumbles.

http://www.toonfox.com/photos/film%20photo%20scans/42880030.JPG

All of these pictures measure 3139x2048 pixels, or about 6.5 megapixels. I don't know if that resolution is dependant on the source negatives or the maximum the scanner can support, but as comparison the photos I took with my film SLR camera back in 2003 came back from the developer on CD as 1536x1024 resolution, which I thought sucked and was a big reason why I was so keen to move to a digital SLR to up the resolution possibilities:

http://www.toonfox.com/photos/new_camera/locks_1_full.JPG