Take Care of Your Negatives!

The Most Important Thing to Archive

On the topic of scrapbooking, one of the things that rarely gets mentioned or written about is film negatives. In my opinion, this is the most important thing to be concerned about archiving and caring for on a long term basis. So many people leave them loose in the little divider envelopes that the pictures came in, never bothering to catalog them, or, they're misplaced altogether. After all, you have the pictures right?

Wrong! If your taking film based pictures, those little strips of film are your masters. The photographs are made from the masters, not the other way around. You can always have another print made from a negative, and yes, you can have a negative made from a photograph, but it will never be as good. The film is the original. It's the first generation of the image. A photograph made from the negative is second generation.

So, if you really want to preserve life's memories, then the first thing you should do is take care of those precious negatives. How?

Some film processing labs will give you back your negatives in protective plastic sleeves. That's a good start but it may not be the end. You also need to be able to file those away in a safe place and label what each roll of film is from. If your film lab gives you something to file them in great, if they don't, you can buy sheets for filing them. 20th Century Plastics http://www.20thcenturydirect.com (request one of their free catalogs) is one company that sells sheets for holding slides, negatives, photographs and lots of other things too. Better camera stores and film labs usually sell negative sheets too.

These sheets are typically designed to hold the negatives for an entire roll of film on a single sheet. They will also usually have a place that you can write in some information for cataloging the sets of negatives. And, typically the sheets ae designed to fit in 3-ring binders.

So archive your negatives! Using a system like this will give you a great way to preserve what is probably the most important item for any memory making or family historian project you ever do!

Negatives are very sensitive. Here's some important tips to remember:

1. Don't handle negatives anymore than is absolutely necessary!

2. Handle negatives from the edges only. Do not touch the image areas on the negatives with anything except a photographic quality brush, and don't do this unless you absolutely have to! The image areas of negatives are very sensitive and easily damaged. Once it's damaged (scratched) it's almost impossible to fix.

3. When transferring negatives from a loose pouch (like when they come back from the photo lab) to protective sheets, check for dirt or dust before sliding them into the sleeves. A gritty piece of dirt on a strip of film can scratch the entire strip when it's being slid into the sleeve.

4. If there is any dust or dirt on negatives that you're placing in protective sheets, blow them off with compressed, canned air first before sliding them into the sleeves. Do not use an air compressor which may contain faint amounts of moisture in the air.

5. Use only archive quality protectors.

6. Place the sheets in a protective binder and store the binder in a safe, closet or dimly lit area. Don't stack heavy items on top of the binder(s) that will cause constant pressure on the negatives in the pages.

7. When you want to have a print made from a negative, take the entire sheet to the lab if possible and let the lab remove the negatives from the sleeve. If you need to put the negative in an envelope that you are dropping off, put it in an individual protective strip sleeve made for negatives first to minimize as much as possible any chance of the negatives getting scratched.

8. If it's a one of kind, most precious, you don't know what you would do if something were to happen to it negative, take it to a professional lab, don't drop it in a film box!

Good Archiving!

Take Care of Your Negatives!

The Most Important Thing to Archive

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