negatives

Photo wallets are an often overlooked and now largely redundant way of receiving your film photos -- but for one collector they are of significance.

A local San Diego newspaper photographer has donated his entire collection of photographs taken during his career to a local university library. Dan Rios studied photography at a local community college, before working at the Escondido Advocate and the North County Times newspapers from 1968 to 2001.

In the past few weeks, I’ve received a lot of requests to share my process for organizing and archiving negatives, and the timing was perfect because a big batch just arrived from my friends at Carmencita Film Lab. Look at this sweet sight of fresh negatives!

A Wyoming-based photographer has uncovered a large collection of family photographs taken throughout the 20th century and digitized them to reveal and preserve the everyday lives of past generations.

The hybrid processes from the transition to digital photography generated lots of garbage, cheap stuff to experiment with. This story is about one of these discoveries.

I don't usually go the negative Nellie with anything photo related, sometimes it's best to keep your mouth firmly shut. But I'm not going to take it anymore, I'm as mad as hell, and I'm going to lean right out the window and shout it to the world, enough, I'm done with rubbish samples of film technology on the Web.

My name is Richard Haw, and I'm a photographer based in Tokyo, Japan. In this post, I'll show you how scanning film works with the Nikon D850's unique new "Negative Digitizer Mode."

Scanning colour negative is without a doubt the most irritating part of my workflow.

Since I started to shoot film, it has been the source of great frustration, especially in terms of color rendition. Each color negative I scan shows a dreadful blue or green cast that's a pain to get rid of in Lightroom.

One of the challenges (and rewards) of managing a digital production lab for a university research library is working with the wide assortment of analog formats that are collected within its archives, special collections, and map library holdings. For instance, we've recently begun conversion work on a 2002 aerial survey of Connecticut that was originally shot on 9"x9" positive black and white film.

Beloved New York Times photographer and lover of fashion Bill Cunningham left a gaping hole in the photo world when he passed away at 87-years-old in June. There's no way to put a dollar value on what we lost when he passed, but the work he left behind has just been valued at $1 million.

Back in 1907, a photo retoucher named C.H. Claudy wrote an article for Volume 17 of Camera magazine titled "Faking the Negative." In the piece, Claudy describes the latest and greatest techniques for "faking a photo" at the time.

Working with a collection of film negatives can be quite an overwhelming task that requires each photograph to be carefully loaded into a scanner for identification. However, when developer Bruce Johnson needed to go through his grandfather’s extensive collection of photographic work, he realized a better solution was needed. Light Box Loupe is the easy iOS solution for proofing negatives (and reversal film) in real-time.

It's not every day that a renowned photographer decides to sell original film slides or negatives on eBay, but that's exactly what Scott Aichner is currently doing. He's selling beautiful surfing prints that come with the frame of film the image was captured on years ago.

If you're a film photographer, here's something you should be aware of: many film processing services at major drug and retail stores will no longer return your original film to you after developing and scanning it.

Photographer Levi Bettweiser and his Rescued Film …

Amidst a messy legal battle over copyrights to Vivian Maier's now famous work, a gallery in Toronto has acquired the entire collection of negatives owned by Jeffrey Goldstein.

London-based artist Nick Gentry is known for using interesting materials to make his photographic work, and his newest series Synthetic Daydreams is no exception. For Synthetic Daydream, Gentry decided to paint realistic portraits on used, discarded film negatives.

One of the most interesting photographic mysteries of the 20th century is the story of the ‘Mexican Suitcase’ -- something that is neither a suitcase, nor Mexican. What it is, is three boxes of roughly 4,500 negatives that depicted the Spanish Civil War, and were lost for more than 50 years.

South Korea-based artist Seung-Hwan Oh creates some truly unusual portraits by unleashing little microbes and letting them eat away at his medium for months or even years. The project is called Impermanence, and it's a series of microbe-mauled portraits that hardly resemble what they were originally captured as.

Almost a year to date after the digging up and opening of Oklahoma City's Century Chest, researchers are getting a rare glimpse at early 20th century Oklahoma City thanks to the help of a Kodak Vest Pocket Camera and eight negatives found in "pristine condition" buried inside the time capsule.

Britons are seeing a new side of the nation's World War I experience thanks to the publication of a small treasure trove of negatives that were only recently discovered tucked away in someone's attic.

Almost one hundred years after a group of explorers set out across the frozen landscape of Antarctica to set up supply depots for famed explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, a box of 22 never-before-seen exposed but unprocessed negatives taken by the group's photographer has been unearthed in one of those shacks, preserved in a block of ice.

Purposely distressing and destroying negatives was never a part of photographer Rohn Meijer's plans, but when he discovered a box of old negatives in his basement that had been exposed to 15 years worth of moisture damage, an idea took shape.

The photos he found that day had a pleasing quality about them, and so Meijer, a fashion photographer by trade, decided he would start taking his old fashion shoot negatives and nearly destroying them into works of art.

Consumer film scanners don't provide enough detail, and professional models require too much money and pampering. What's a dedicated film nerd to do? For Peter De Smidt, the answer was to build his own high-res scanner using the Nikon D600 and 50mm Micro lens he already had on hand, a bit of lumber and a lot of patience.

You might not know this, but there was metadata before there was, well, metadata. Way back in 1914, Kodak introduced the Autographic system, a combination of autographic cameras and film that allowed you to permanently sign, date and title your negatives as you shot them.

Back in 2011, we shared a series of "Genetic Portraits" by photographer Ulric Collette that showed portraits of various family members spliced together to show the similarities and differences of those who share DNA. Photographer Andrew Ryan did something similar for his project Base Pairs, except he ventured along the analog route instead of going fully digital.