Bringing New Life to Your Old Photographs and Negatives by John Dersham

Remember all those old pictures you and your family have been taking for generations, on film? Do you have your negatives and prints in a drawer or shoe box, or neatly in a photo album? With the advent of digital imaging most people have changed the way they look at and share pictures. The standard has shifted from handing friends and family hard copies of pictures or showing them your photo album to emailing them or putting them on Facebook or other online photo galleries. In the last few years looking at pictures electronically has surpassed traditional viewing.
Let’s remember the purpose of taking pictures is so we can preserve a moment in time permanently. Traditional photographic materials like film and photographic prints can last for 100-200 years if stored under normal conditions inside a drawer or closet in a house. So now that technology has changed, what are you doing with your old prints and negatives? Are you showing them to anyone anymore? Wouldn’t it be nice to share them on Facebook or put them on an online gallery where you and the whole family and your friends can remember the old days again, even if they live far away? The answer is that you can. There are print and negative scanners available from all the major companies like HP, Epson, Lexmark, Kodak, Dell and many more. If you buy a dedicated film scanner there are models that allow you to scan negatives and slides of all sizes and prints too. The quality of your scanned images will be as good as your original negative, slide or print. If you had a good 35mm camera and have the negative, your images will be equal to those currently being shot on digital Single Lens Reflex. If you have a lot of images taken on the former 126 instamatic format or 110, the scanned pictures will be equal to the original quality. The nice thing about scanning your negatives, slides and prints is that once done, your images can be treated like any other digital picture. You can color correct them, crop, enlarge, print, email them or post them online. You can also take the digital files and have them printed at any photo lab. In addition you can name each image as you scan it, or you can name your whole roll of film you scan, or both. You can record your family history in chronological order. Storing the pictures on your computer will make for a great long term way to look at and share your memories.
Warning! Save your picture files to a back up drive, CD, DVD, thumb drive or online storage service. Do not think your digital images are safe and permanent on your computer without a backup. One day a computer crash, virus or the loss of your hard drive will take all your images away, including the ones you shot on digital to begin with. Digital photography is only as permanent as your storage methods. Always have a backup.
You can buy a dedicated film scanner at some mass merchants like; Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart and Camera stores. You can also buy them online at Amazon, Adorama, B&H Photo and Video etc. Canon and Epson seem to have the best film scanners for home use. Epson also makes professional film scanners, as does Nikon. You can pay from $75.00 to $300.00 for one that scans negative and slides. If you have a lot of negatives and prints to scan and they are different sizes, I recommend the Epson 700 or 750M Professional. These will scan negatives of all sizes up to 8x10 and also scan prints up to 8x10 and cost about $700.00 A 35mm negative or slide scanned at 6400 DPI will produce about the same file size as a digital SLR camera of about 18MP. Most people find scanning at 2400 DPI to be sufficient for their needs.