House Grooming

How to Keep Photo Negatives Properly?

Thanx! to the modern computer technology as it has done one great work of preserving her album full of the treasure of her family photographs and this can be enjoyed by her descendants a thousand years from now. Just by taking a proper care and storage her original black and white prints could last 150 years and the negatives perhaps longer.With the skillful use of copying techniques, high quality, low-cost copy negatives can be made for printing as well as for computer scanning. Protecting and preserving her photographs requires knowledge together with a bit of endurance and hard work, but the results are well worth the effort.

Learning about photographic conservation can be a bit annoying in some ways as it be actually harmful rather than helpful to her photographs. Many times a person commonly becomes horrified at all the things they have been doing wrong. At times, they will over-react and quickly go do something destructive, such as handle all their negatives to look for damage! One should never forget that it's almost never too late to begin preserving her old photos. Therefore, one has to take a prompt decision that he won't do anything to his photographs until he has meticulously read these guidelines and decide on a preservation plan.

Preservation of photographs is even more intricate than most document or painting preservation. In order to understand why this is so, we must look try to understand at the chemistry of photography. The fine-looking old white and black print of your grandparents on their wedding day is really a complex blend of tiny silver particles embedded in the gelatin surface of photographic paper. Dyes, chemicals left over from developing the print, ink, mounting papers, and adhesives round out the conglomeration. Every such item affects the life of the print in some way. Infact, even the gelatin is vulnerable to light, heat, cracking, fingerprints, scratching, bug infestation, mold, mildew, humidity, water damage, etc. Lotions and chemicals which made the print possible are usually left in small amounts in the paper. Over time these will often work against the, causing it to fade or spot.

At times, many mounting boards and even some photographic papers are acidic and the remaining acid left in the paper will break down the paper and eventually ruin the photograph. Inks and dyes generally lose color with time. Some inks do contain chemicals that will accelerate photographic deterioration and nearly all the common glues and adhesives cause long term damage to photographs (perhaps without even touching the print itself)--some commonly used ones can visibly damage a photograph within five or ten years! Therefore, because they produce better copies and are less chemically intricate, photographic transparencies and negatives are often better to store long-term than prints. Infact, negatives also have a silver-impregnated gelatin layer, but the modern ones use a thin, long-life plastic backing that does not easily retain chemical impurities. It is actually because of the gelatin, negatives are still subject to heat, light, cracking, scratching, fingerprints, bug infestation, mold, mildew, humidity, water damage, as well as the chemical and physical problems introduced with storage.