AdamJun 29, 2024
Jack Baty

I'm making brand-new silver gelatin prints from century-old negatives and it's making me giddy. I had always planned to make a custom holder and dig out the 4x5 enlarger, but it occurred to me that these negatives are big enough for simple contact prints, so that's what I'm doing.

Also, never throw away your negatives! 100 years from now, someone might want to make new prints from them.

#FilmPhotography

Jun 29, 2024 at 2:29pmWeb
Show threadTristan Colgate-McFarlaneJun 29, 2024
@jbaty the smiley knife guys definitely deserve an enlargement though!
Show threadMorag PerkinsJun 29, 2024

@jbaty is that your profile pic in the corner of one of them?

You're a time traveller!

Show threadJack BatyJun 29, 2024
@moragperkins Good eye :). Yes that's the photo that has my profile pic.
Show threadJon BosakJun 29, 2024
@jbaty +1 to saving negs, especially b&w. I'm in the process of scanning and posting my own photos from almost 60 years ago, and the early ones have held up amazingly well despite being stored rather badly and kept under some pretty bad conditions. If kept correctly (which means kept dry and away from sulphur), silver is forever. Kodak once estimated the potential life of a silver print at 500+ years, and I suspect that b&w negs will last about that long, too.
Show threadJon BosakJun 29, 2024
@jbaty What I mean by "silver is forever": this silver vase belonged to Entemena, king of Lagesh. It's over four thousand years old.
Show threadAdamJun 29, 2024
@jbaty @moragperkins
Those are some wonderful prints. Definitely agree with keeping negatives. Just started making new silver gelatin prints from my old B&W negatives. Only 35mm and only half a century old but they seem as good as new after being stored in glassine pages for all these years. Did take a moment to figure out the new fangled timer in the public darkroom being as it was a positively youthful 30 year old model…
Show threadJack BatyJun 29, 2024
@acavan So much fun, isn't it? You're lucky to have a public darkroom nearby.
Show threadAdamJun 29, 2024

@jbaty I can’t imagine ever growing tired of seeing an image appear in the developer tray. San Francisco’s darkroom, now The Harvey Milk Photo Center, has been in operation since 1940. Between my high school’s darkroom and the B&W photo lab where I worked through high school, I didn’t use it very often back in the day (mid 1970s) but it remains an amazing resource. Coincidentally, the lab I worked in did the B&W work for Harvey’s shop, Castro Camera.

#sfba #hmpc