Scanning old photos

[oRGie]

Last few days I started the process of scanning my old photos. Its taken the last few days just scanning the really old pics I have picked up from before I was taking them myself, pics of me at 3 weeks old lol  and now I realise what a job I have undertaken, I have thousands of photos!!!   nearly 30 years worth in fact, lots of memories and from the days of rolls of film and nearly all the shots are keepers for sentimental value. From about 12 years ago when I got my first slr, I noticed the quality got a lot better technically, but I was taking pics of anything and everything, so at least from then each roll only has maybe 25% worth scanning.

Here's me on my mums knee and below my dad looking sharp



3 weeks old, according to the note on the back



Please feel free to join in here and post really old pics, could be fun  

[anglefire]

This is a scan of me when I got stuck on a beach in Scotland in about 1983.
I have some other really old ones that I'll find at some point!

[picsfor]

Me at running age apparently in Bushey Hill near Guildford when it was still a seperate village! Oh it looks so different today! Neil Armstrong had still to be chosen for Apollo 11!



And an early school picture - clearly things had moved on since my Dads box brownie!

[SimonW]

This says it all really...

Me as a baby

I suspect we've all got pix as old as these in a shoe box somewhere. I wonder how long all your digital images will survive?

[SimonW]

A box of large glass negatives came to light recently - must have been from MY grandmother.

Scan from an old glass negative - spot the gas light.

[Hybridphotog]

Please feel free to join in here and post really old pics, could be fun  

Righto. Here's two from my collection. Looking ready for some mischief...


... and wielding my first SLR, a Zenit E...

[Simple]

My Great Grandma. Earliest Picture I have. She was born 1845 and died in 1933 her husband was farmer labourer.

[ABERS]

1937 Abers,
Still got me hair

[Oldboy]

1937 Abers,
Still got me hair

Yes, but is it in your ears, nose and eyebrows?  

[anglefire]

This is one from around the 1st World War.

Happy wedding!

[oRGie]

Great shots    Its been a real trip down memory lane for me.  I have a framed pic on my wall from around 1940, but I havent got the original to scan yet 

Actually WBM yesterday evening - looking at some old family photos from the mid-late 60s and realizing how far cameras and photography have evolved (I as going to say developed), and wondering how/why people used to bother taking family snapshots at all back then. 
I can't recall the make of my father's (120) camera, but I know it only had a dial to set the film speed (which would have been incredibly slow by today's ISO standards), and an aperture selector for sunny or cloudy - the youngsters here will never believe it... 
These days we comment about merits of viewfinders, or complain about the lack of them on so many modern compacts, but looking back at these snaps the optical viewfinders back then must have been poor, and seemed to bear little relevance to the view thru the wide-ish angle lens; if the subject was centre of frame, it was so far away to be difficult to discern who or what was being photographed, and if any effort was made to get closer to the subject it was then invariably part or nearly all out of frame!  I can't remember if the camera had any means to alter focus or if it was fixed focus - either way 95+% of the photos were fuzzy or blurred!

I was thinking similar looking at the photos, but strangely enough the old ones have a certain quality thats sort of expected, the funny thing is the shots from 1975 to 1985 ish are the worst I have, all crappy point and shoots, not untill I got my first slr did things improve dramatically...

[Eileen]

Great thread. Must look out some of my old pictures sometime soon.
I agree about shots from the 70s and 80s looking particularly bad. I think those old Instamatics and point and shoots had very small and inaccurate viewfinders. One reason I started taking pictures was that my family snaps often had missing heads and limbs because it was hard to frame them properly and I was sure I could do better.

[John Doyle2]

Eileen:- I agree about shots from the 70s and 80s looking particularly bad. I think those old Instamatics and point and shoots had very small and inaccurate viewfinders.
Most of the cameras had no focusing aid [no built-in rangefinder] No auto focus in those days. So many old snaps suffered from poor focusing too.

[Hybridphotog]

Most of the cameras had no focusing aid [no built-in rangefinder] No auto focus in those days. So many old snaps suffered from poor focusing too.

No disrespect meant, but the lenses for the cheaper end of the photography market weren't exactly pin-sharp (along with most (all?) pre-war lenses). Plus, photographs were dependant on being developed with whatever fine grain developer was available at the time. Then there's what film was being used, the grain varied with this as well.

But, you're right with the poor focussing... although that really was dependant on camera design. For example, I can rely on the focussing of my Leicas (even though the Standard has no rangefinder), whereas the Ensign Ful-Vue has a very dodgy focussing setup (the two I have have turnable focussing lenses, but certainly aren't secure in their mounts).

[John Doyle2]

None taken. Sure, the quality of many lenses on the cheaper cameras were not great, aperture and shutter speed, didn't offer much flexibility too. Processing [developing ] at that time could be an issue as well. Developing was often done by pharmacies, some were good and some not!