WTF, over?

[soldiergrrrl]

Why in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is it so bloody hard to figure out how to store old photographs, without getting into scrapbooking?

I DO NOT WANT TO SCRAPBOOK.  I want to find a nice post-bound album with acid-free friggin' pages and acid-free friggin' photo corners and try and get the stuff put in it.  I don't have the time to scrapbook, the money or the inclination to get inundated with yet another space-time-and-money-intensive bloody friggin' hobby.

GAH!  GAH!  I repeat, for those of you who haven't heard, GAH!

Also, WTF is the *point* of taking pictures if all the advice is "OMG!  NEVER display photos!  Make copies and display those, but if you display originals, they'll turn into dust and you'll feel really horrible because you'll be destroying all the pictoral evidence that your family ever existed!"

Gah.

Comments

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

It makes sense to put copies of vintage photos into scrapbooks - you don't really want to risk those - but for current snapshots? WHY?

"Scrapbooking" (as opposed making old fashioned scrapbooks, with other bits of memorabilia and newspaper clippings and such) strikes me as a form of collage, but collage as craft as opposed to art, with its own language and tools. Everything needs to coordinate, the more "embellishments" per page, the better. I can get on a whole rant about embellishments. And they use "dimension" entirely wrong.

I watch too many craft shows, you see. And yet the only craft I do is knitting. And cooking. Oh, and writing. But no embellishments.

[soldiergrrrl.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know. In fact I have some really awesome vintage shots that I'm going to scan and get repaired, then print them, but mostly it's the guilt trips I don't get.

Seriously, some of these folx make me feel like I'll be going to the special hell (you know, the one reserved for people who talk during movies) if I dare put photos on my wall!

:-D

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Why not? Just don't hang them where they'll get direct sunlight all day.

Besides, we have vintage photos up. It's NICE.

[soldiergrrrl.livejournal.com]

I think it's to protect them, but I think if you hang them with the UV glass, and out of direct sun, it's fine.

My parents have vintage photos up, and I love them. I can't wait to hang ours!

[dogmaticus.livejournal.com]

I hang vintage (late 1800s early 1900s) photos up as well.

Color photos will experience dye fading at different rates, that's why you see colors from the 60s that look orangy it's because the yellow and cyan have degraded faster than the magenta.

Black & white is infintely more archivable, a properly washed B&W print will outlast a color print by centuries. Rare metal prints are even more durable palladium & platinum are much more archivable than silver.

It all boils down to this, photos (especially family photos) were taken to be enjoyed. I doubt my Great-great-Grandmother would be very happy if I kept her wedding picture in a box rather than over my piano. Hang them in places that the sun doesn't shine directly on and you'll be fine. As for color photos your best bet is to have copies made as modern dyes are much more durable that those from even the 80s. If you display vintage color it's going to shift colors fast. UV filtration will help but only a very small amount, it's not UV light that causing the damage, it's LIGHT, across the full spectrum. The only "filter" that will truly help is opaque black!

[soldiergrrrl.livejournal.com]

Ah..okay. How do they "correct" the ones that are damaged and torn up, though?

I've got some older B&W that are just spotted and faded, and I'm wondering how to get the corrected copies made.

Er. Sorry, I'm rambling.

[dogmaticus.livejournal.com]

You'd be surprised what can be fixed. My friend gandryyne specializes in photo restoration.

B&W photos that have faded are a problem because they were probably never properly washed when they were printed. I have B&W photos that I personally printed for newspaper publication while in college that have faded very much, I also have art print that I printed on the same equipment using the same chemicals that are perfect after 20 years, paper is still bright white and blacks are are vibrant black. My personal thought is that a fading B&W print can be saved by thoroghly rewashing the print, this of course will only work with fibre based photo paper and not with newer RC paper.

For the most part with irreplaceable photos the best bet is to have them scanned by high resolution scanners and save the uncompressed TIFF files in multiple places and to just print display copies as needed.

If you have repair work that you need to talk to a professional about let me know and I'll introduce you to gandryyne

[moropus.livejournal.com]

Photoshop baby. I used to correct photos and I was the photoshop baby. You just take an educated guess on how many buttons Grandpa had on his shirt and paste them in from other pictures of him and other men from the same time frame, even the uncle he's sitting next to. Buttons appear at a regular spacing and men's dress shirts are predictable. You get a huge monitor and blow that thing up so each pixel is visable and add pixels until you are finished. If there was something in the background I couldn't understand, I'd just paste in wall or sky. Of course, you have to justify not being able to guess what that painting over the sofa looked like, but unless they brought me a clear photo of that part of the room, they were SOL.

This is why I am near sighted and have arthritis in my hands. One reason anyway. I was terribly slow at it, but good enough to fix all the WWI and WWII photos enough to make the Cols. happy. It could take me a week to fix one photo, sticking on a few pixels at a time. I could never work at a studio at that rate, but I was really good at guessing what color pixel went on next. I'd stick one brick on a building at a time and then spend half an hour deciding what the shadows on that brick should look like.

Its hard to guess sometimes. I left several spots off the company dog mascot until they brought me some more photos and a couple drawings of his uniform. I just took a wild flying guess at what a dog's uniform shirt ought to look like and made him a buck sgt. because it seemed like a good idea at the time when 'everyone' remembered the dog being a LT. 'Everyone' could have told me this in advance, considering Lt. Dog died before WWII was over. And wasn't there a little tree over here? Like I would know. Find me a photo or a drawing or even tell me the height and species and I'll make you one.

[gandryyne.livejournal.com]

Heya Grrrl!

Doggy told me about your dilemma. My day job right now has me specializing in restoring old photos. Here's a really good example of the type of thing I do: http://pics.livejournal.com/gandryyne/pic/000dhwac/g9

While normally I am all for having the vintage photos professionally framed and hung, I actually believe it's better to have them scanned in, restored and then frame the prints any way your heart desires. Save the original photos in an archival acid free box.

When I do these sort of projects, I often find that I can bring forth details from the scan that were barely visible in the original print. It's pretty dang cool. :)


Also, this site has some pretty cool archival albums and storage solutions you might be interested in: http://www.archivalmethods.com/Product.cfm?categoryid=8&Productid=72

[soldiergrrrl.livejournal.com]

As odd as it sounds, I may try and take a photo to show you the damage I mean, and see if you think it's worth taking somewhere. It's spotted, for whatever reason.

[gandryyne.livejournal.com]

Sure, let's see it! :) Either post it here or email it to me if you'd like: gandryyne at yahoo dot com. :)

I've fixed some photos that were in unbelievably bad shape, so I'm optimistic for you!

[soldiergrrrl.livejournal.com]

Thanks! :-) I'll take some shots of the worst damaged, and we'll go from there. :-) I don't want to take up your time when you do this professionally, so we'll work something out, yes?

[gandryyne.livejournal.com]

I can certainly work on them if you'd like. :)

[soldiergrrrl.livejournal.com]

I would be thrilled. We just got new computers so the scanner isn't connected, but I can fix that!

They're up on my LJ now, if you want to take a look at what I'm talking about. Those are zoomed and cropped, but I think the detail shows up pretty well. In one, you can see a spot on the hand, that I *think* might be closer to the original developed b&w image.

Thank you sooooo much!

[soldiergrrrl.livejournal.com]

I'm about to post the photos of the old photos.

They're not great, but I tried to get them as close to true as I could. :-) They'll be in the LJ. :-)

[exvapi.livejournal.com]

I agree about color. Save the negitive (or file in a non-compressed format) and reprint every so often for display.

[dogmaticus.livejournal.com]

Or better yet, digital frames are becoming very affordable. Digital frames can be wifi enabled and pull jpgs off a server within the home. Which is the perfect thing because you can have different directories set up for different visitors, seriously it's awesome.

[gi-janearng.livejournal.com]

Hobby Lobby? I believe a lot of their albums are acid free.

I hear you on the scrapbooking. I just don't have the time and I want to have something that holds ALL my pictures. Not just a few favorites.

And yeah, I normally don't condone violating copyright laws, but I scan all my good and pro photos that I don't have on CD in high resolution as a back up...just in case. That way I don't have to worry about the original getting destroyed.

[soldiergrrrl.livejournal.com]

I'm going to be loading all my photos on DVD one of these days and storing them with important papers in a bank box, but...

Until then, I'd just like to put all the photos in albums that won't eat them. (The damage the magnetic pages have done is...wow.)

[auxdarastrix.livejournal.com]

http://www.genealogicalstorageproducts.com/index.html

[dracphelan.livejournal.com]

Part of what I use my web hosting for is offsite storage of photos and other electronic documents that I want to make sure I have a copy of. I have a directory set up outside of the web directory that I FTP anything I don't want public to.

[auxdarastrix.livejournal.com]

Well, for the truly obsesive, there is always The Hollinger Corporation.

Displaying photos: It the purpose to preserve the photos as original artifacts or the preseve the pictural evidence? If the latter, than high quality scans are adequete. Just make sure that once you digitize, you follow the presevation principle of LOTS. As in, lots and lots of copies. Harddrives can always fail, and it doesn't take much to render a DVD or CD unreadable.

[(Anonymous)]

I should say, high quality scans are adequete as the presevation medium.

[exvapi.livejournal.com]

http://www.albumsource.com/cgi-local/SoftCart.exe/cgi-local/smpagegen.exe?U+scstore+jlkt8315fff87df8+-p+-c+scstore.cfg+B1010

[dkountz81.livejournal.com]

For the record I am a professional photographer (that means that I make my living with my craft, not that I just have an expensive camera)

The purpose of photographs has been, historically, to document and enjoy whatever the photograph is of. As far and old familial photographs are concerned, remember that the people creating them didn't always have any idea of them lasting as long as they have. For treasured photographs, displayed under glass with a uv coating (always making sure that the photographs don't actually TOUCH the glass) out of direct sunlight, they can be enjoyed for years to come. Although backing them up on DVD is always a good idea, just in case.
On the subject of scrapbooking, aka pain in the ass, there are some benefits. At most stores you can purchase 12x12 archival paper and photo-corners, which is what I use for all my old pictures. For the newer ones, I recommend a panel frame (or a grouping of them) that you like hanging on your wall in your favorite spot. Because most modern photographs are printed using super heated chemistry to accelerate the process, modern color pictures are not going to last anywhere near as long as the older ones have. So unless it's a fine art photograph, slowly and lovingly processed by a professional printer, that you want to hand down to your grandchildren, I wouldn't lose sleep over how your displaying them.

[momwolf.livejournal.com]

I go to the office supply place and buy those plastic sleeves that fit 3 ring notebooks. You can get them in 50 or 100 batches - and you can get the school type 3 ring notebooks anywhere,

[soldiergrrrl.livejournal.com]

Oh! BTW, found out that my grandfather was not born in 1922. More like 1930! Evidently, he lied (BIG TIME) about his age to get into the CCC in the late late 30s/early 40s.

Also found some more information on his family. :-D

[momwolf.livejournal.com]

Send it on - I'll add it to the stuff I have already found.

[soldiergrrrl.livejournal.com]

Okay. We're totally cleaning today, but I'll see if I can get it out tomorrow.

[npy2005.livejournal.com]

I just want to point out that I appreciate your reference to the flying spaghetti monster. Nobody else has mentioned it

[soldiergrrrl.livejournal.com]

I thought it was more amusing than my usual, and I don't feel bad swearing by the FSM.

[(Anonymous)]

May you be smitten by its noodly appendage!

cMAD

[soldiergrrrl.livejournal.com]

Probably not, but it's still amusing to me. :-D

[redselchie.livejournal.com]

you should be able to find archive quality books at your local (real!) camera store.

Old style albums

[lwj2.livejournal.com]

Lotsa luck finding one, Jen.

If you do, please drop me a line telling me where you did.

lwj