[pure-silver] Re: Damage to old negatives and prints

Mike, First, sorry for your loss and I too picked up a box of my dad's old
negs last year. You should expect all sorts of unevenness in fading of color
depending on just what they were exposed to; air, paper, humidity, how these
all stacked up.  The bronzing is not uncommon with those storage conditions.
Mike Ware has a book on deterioration of early photographs, that while not
specifically about your negs, may give you some additional insights into
what happens to silver over the years as it is exposed to environmental
conditions.   

The worst thing that I have had to deal with, although not with my dad's
archive, is mold and mildew on negs. I recently scanned some old glass negs
that were the smaller 2 3/4 x 3? That also should signs of bronzing and
mildew. They scanned fine and with the help of PS they were restore just
fine. 

The older film that will require processing may also be ok, with the
anticipated fogging of old film. I used a pinch of benzatrizole with some
HC110 which seemed to work ok on some 828 rolls. You should need to worry
about edge fog, but if the humidity got to high the rolls my have stuck
together. 

In camera light leak may account for what appears to be fading. It may be
why your dad left the last 30 rolls unprocessed. He knew that they were
going to be problem rolls. Have a good explore!

Eric 


Eric Neilsen Photography
4101 Commerce Street
Suite 9
Dallas, TX 75226
http://e.neilsen.home.att.net
http://ericneilsenphotography.com
Skype ejprinter
> -----Original Message-----
> From: pure-silver-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:pure-silver-
> bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Michael Healy
> Sent: Saturday, October 28, 2006 9:53 PM
> To: pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [pure-silver] Damage to old negatives and prints
> 
> I'm wondering whether I might solicit some feedback about old negatives,
> their
> condition, what happens as they age under unfavorable conditions, what can
> be done
> about problems that arise.
> 
> When my father died this summer, I had the privilege of gathering together
> his life's
> collection of negatives and slides, and shipping them here to Phoenix.
> They date back
> to his first shots as a teenager in 1947. Among them I also found packets
> of original
> negatives shot by my mother's father in the early- and mid-1940s. All of
> these negs and
> slides spent 50+ years enduring the weather of Illinois and Nebraska -
> summer temps in
> the 90s and 100s, humidity far beyond the tolerance of tolerant human
> beings.
> 
> One of my concerns has been their physical condition.
> 
> (His ektachrome slides from the 1950s and 1960s surprised me. Many have
> undergone
> considerable shifts in color, which looks to me like it's actually a
> fading and loss of one
> color layer, usually the blue, since these now lean toward orange or
> magenta.
> Inexplicably, however, other rolls from the same period are in perfect
> condition, with no
> loss or change of color at all. Weird.)
> 
> Regarding his black and whites: I've encountered three issues so far.
> 
> (1) what looks like bronzing of the emulsion side of certain negs. Is this
> a problem? I'm
> trying to guess what might have caused it, and the only thing that occurs
> to me is
> inadequate fixing. But that doesn't make a lot of sense to me: these are
> 50 and even 60
> years old. Inadequate fixing should have killed them outright years ago.
> Note that I have
> not yet tried printing any of these, so I can't say what influence this
> bronzing will actually
> have. Scans (done in color) do produce some interesting colors; but they
> scan fine.
> 
> (2) An odd condition in a number of my grandpa's negs. These were
> snapshots only,
> and the negs were carelessly stuffed into paper Walgreen's sleeves
> (Walgreen's photo
> finishing in 1952! Shows MY lack of years....).  A number of them show two
> different
> densities across the neg. There is a diagonal line, and on one side the
> neg is denser by
> half or even a stop. Like half of it faded in the sun. The effect is
> exactly as if you printed
> it to paper as a test print, and did the neg at one exposure, then did
> only half of it for
> another exposure. I've never seen anything like this. What could possibly
> have affected
> the neg itself like this?!
> 
> (3) Prints: One packet of prints (done in the late 1940s) were simply
> pasted to the pages
> of a photo album - all pages being black construction paper, presumably
> with Elmer's
> glue or some equivalent. Many of these have come away from their page,
> taking paper
> with them. I'm thinking of resoaking these prints to remove some of the
> paper. While it
> would NOT remove glue that had seeped into the print, it would get rid of
> the patches of
> black paper that remain attached. Is there a problem with doing this? Is
> there a reason
> why a 60 year old print cannot simply be soaked and re-dried? BTW, all of
> these were
> ferrotyped. Would soaking undo this effect, or did this treatment
> permanently alter the
> physical properties of a print's surface?
> 
> My dad also left some 30 rolls of 35 mm b&w film unprocessed, which he
> shot from
> about 1965 to 1970. I'm going to have to float a few questions about
> these, too. But for
> now, I figure that another six months won't be their undoing after all
> these years!
> 
> Any thoughts or insights would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
> 
> Mike Healy
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