Week 16 - Negatives (52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks)

 As a positive thinking person, when I see the word negative in regards to genealogy, it should go to  negative search results or a negative story about an individual, but coming from a family of photo takers, my mind immediately goes to photo negatives. So photography made the most sense for this week's post. 

 I have been known as a packrat, or archivist the title that I prefer, and I have never thrown away a negative from any photo that my husband or I have taken since we are married.   We have adult grandchildren now, so you can imagine the number of them. I have also been fortunate enough to have found a couple of older negatives from our parent's homes mixed in with the old photos.  It seems no one else kept many negatives once they had their prints made. So I scooped them up to examine. In looking at them, I realized that I had never seen a copy of the prints from a few of them.  Back when I found them, you could still easily find a place to get prints made from them.  So I did and the best surprise came when a few turned out to be baby pictures of my husband that neither of us had ever seen.  

When I think about photography's history, it's interesting that we have no negatives for photos that we take today with our digital cameras and phones.  The downside of that is that if the photo is lost it is lost forever.  When my mom had her first digital camera, she would take pictures then go to a camera shop to have prints made from them. That works until she came home and did not save them to her computer and deleted them from her camera!  With no negatives, we are back to having only one print and no way to share.   When there are no negatives from older family photos, how can the only copy of a photo be shared?  Well, here's what we did. Before computer scanners were common in everyone's home, it could mean finding a local camera store who might be able to make a copy or a negative of the old photo.  I did do that for a few but it could get expensive quickly if you had a lot that you wanted to reproduce.  The next idea that I had was to take my own photos of the photos and the bonus was that you ended up with a decent print and a NEGATIVE! Since my husband had the skill and the good camera to do this, we would borrow family albums and photos to do this with.  It worked pretty well.  But the photos were still only shareable by taking the negative out to have prints made from it.  But a step in the right direction.  Then we had our first scanner. Now we could scan the prints and have digital "negatives". It was somewhat time consuming in the beginning but got the job done.  After scanning ALL of our photos over the years, I felt that I had actually saved the memories forever and made them easily shareable.  Now today, I have a nice phone that makes it even easier to take a photo of a photo and they are instantly shareable by skipping the step of getting them onto a computer in order to share.  So does this make negatives obsolete?  Maybe not, because if you find that your color snapshots are beginning to fade or discolor, and you have the negative, well  it would still be possible to have a new print made or scan the negative itself. All of this makes sharing and preservation pretty darn easy, but I still like looking thru a physical photo album and holding an old photo in my hand.  

Negatives came in many different sizes and shapes depending on the type of camera used. 

Here are some that I have. 

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