Working with very old negatives and slides

[csziggy]

I've posted about some of this before but I will add updates as I work with the old film I have from my father.

My Dad took lots of pictures over the years, but he didn't store his slides or negatives - or even the prints from them - very well. Some slides are in old leatherette boxes, some were just thrown loose into drawers, sometimes in baggies, sometimes in paper envelopes. The negatives are even worse - many were in paper envelopes, some in the original ones from the developers.

But the worst was the cache we found in his dresser drawer. Here is a partial inventory:

11 reels Univex 8mm cine film - 2" to 2-3/8" reels. Some are very curled side to side, some are held closed with tape, some have lengths just hanging out.

8-9 rolls 35mm negatives, unknown number of exposures. Very tightly coiled, some very brittle. Need unrolled and flattened, maybe scanned.

Under the 8mm film were newspaper clippings from 1939. Other negatives and prints found in the drawer date from the late 1930s and 1940s - pictures of dowtown Tampa, Florida in the late 1930s and baby pictures of my oldest sister taken in 1946, for instance.

3 rolls undeveloped Kodak Plus-X PX135 - 36 exposure film

1 roll undeveloped Kodak Super XX 135 - 20 exposure film

2 rolls undeveloped Panchromatic (made in Belgium) exposed, unknown number of images

1 roll undeveloped Agfa A-8 exposed

There were also a number of individual medium format negatives just loose in an envelope along with some contact prints of some of the negatives but not all. Those I have scanned (without cleaning). They date from the late 1930s by the cars in some images, and the age of my uncle in a couple of them. Some of those negatives are of historic interest and they have been lent to the Florida Photographic Archives to be scanned.

After talking to the experts at the archives I tried to work with the tightly coiled negatives. I put them in room temperature purified water. So far three rolls completely disintegrated. When the archive experts looked at those, they didn't give me any hope of recovering them so I was not surprised.

One roll was too fragile to hang to dry but it held together enough for my husband and I to lay it out full length on a clean white cotton sheet. We can see images but who knows what will happen when it dries?

Two full rolls are in decent shape and are hung up in the upstairs bathroom to dry. The other rolls were groups of short strips - they are hung up also.

Progress of sorts!

[Whoa_Nelly]

1. Whoa

Sounds so interesting!
Hope to see what you get from all this.