HPR4259: Why digitize photos

Hacker Public Radio

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host.

Today I want to talk about why digitizing analog photos.

Three years ago, I wrote a chapter in the annual book for a home village association. The chapter was about life in a small village in the 1930's. In addition to the text I had a couple of black and white photo prints from those days.

I said black and white. But honestly, an eighty year old black and white print is not only black and white. Because of aging, type of paper and development method, the black and white print has colours. Should the photos in the book chapter be of best black and white photo quality, or should they reflect the prints as they are at the time of the book release?

There is no right or wrong answer into that question. But it relates to the topic, why digitize?

I have found the web site "Preserving history. How to Digitally Archive and Share Historical Photographs, Documents, and Audio Recordings".

The main focus is photographs, but as the title states it is also about documents and audio. The web site is written and organized as a book and is a very comprehensive and useful resource. It is a few years old but is still to a large extent accurate and relevant. The exact details, which equipment, formats, settings and so on can be discussed. And as technology has evolved, what the book describes as best has to some extent changed so the best practise can now in some cases be seen as good practise.

The book has a chapter titled "Historical Archive Versus Personal Photograph Collection".

The historical archive is about to preserve the object in every detail, e.g. colours, scratches, borders and dimensions. It is applicable for true archives, like museums and other public archives.

The other reason to digitize is of personal and family reasons. In this scope, the focus is to have good photos. This approach gives better flexibility in method, equipment and settings, and in general the work will probably be less time consuming.

So the take away from this episode is that I recommend you to give the purpose of why you digitize photos a thought before you start a big digitizing project. And that you need to balance any desire to make the best possible archival copy with the best possible equipment and all time in the world with what is realistic for you, and what is good enough. And at the other end, the happiness to have and share a digital photo copy of any quality is better than none at all, but considering a bit more of work and attention may improve the quality significantly.

Finally, I also want to give a few remarks to my own episode number 4244.

I talked about placing the negative or positive in direct contact to glass under or above it. Be observant, there is a risk this will create Newton rings which can affect the result in a not acceptable way.

The problem that the object is not totally flat in a flat bed scanner should in most cases not be a problem because the scanners are normally designed to manage a bit of focus depth.

Remarks on my repro setup:

My digital camera is mounted on a repro stand. The stand is similar to the stand used in an analog darkroom.

The "duplication direction" is opposite to the analog darkroom: The camera is mounted on the stand, while the object to be duplicated is placed on the base plate.

I have a light table on the base plate when a negative or positive is duplicated.

Mounted on the camera, depending on lens, may an extension tube be needed to achieve the macro distance to duplicate a small object.

References:

• Preserving history. How to Digitally Archive and Share Historical Photographs, Documents, and Audio Recordings. https://archivehistory.jeksite.com

• Two methods of digitizing photos. https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps/hpr4244/index.html

Provide feedback on this episode.