Developing old B&W negatives

        My dad (John Hinton "Jack" Edmonds) bought his first camera when he was 16, back in 1926. He was an avid photographer from that moment on, and in the early days out on the farm he took heaps and developed them himself.

        When he died I inherited, along with his photo collection, a much much larger collection of negatives. It’s hard to fathom what those old ones are, but could be valuable for family history, so I put some through the flatbed scanner as best I could, but mostly they turned out pretty bad no matter what I did with the settings. And to have them commercially developed would cost a mint.

        But a while back I got serious, did some online research (bless you YouTube!), picked through their most promising experiments, built my own gadget, lots of trial and error, finally cracked it.

        So I’m now in the process of grinding through Dad’s endless boxes of black celluloid, and will put up any relevant family history ones here on “The Bones”, and also replace those fairly awful early attempts.

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If you’re in the same boat, or know someone else with old B+W negs they’d like to print, this is how I did it…

            Mine’s just a topless bottomless box (about 30cm x 20cm x 10cm) and lined inside with kitchen foil (shiniest side inwards), sitting on a sheet of ply also covered with foil, with a glass top (I used an old picture frame).

I put more foil UNDER the glass, and some white card on top, each with a photo-sized hole cut in it. I put a globe inside the box (I found a 14W energy-saver “fluoro” type best as it runs cool – DON’T use an old filament job! – and it has a nice soft diffused white light. But put it down one end, not directly under the hole in the top, instead put a piece of white paper on the bottom of the box under the hole, as the crinkles and texture of the foil may show on the photos.

Set up a tripod as shown and fix the camera to it. I tried my old Canon digital but it was hopeless, wouldn’t focus reliably, and moved when I pressed the shutter. I found that my digital video camera is far and away the best, using its PhotoShot function – great zoom, auto focus up close, set to hi-res, and click using the remote zapper. Make sure the negatives are shiny side up. And you’ll probably need a small pane of glass to lay on top as many of them tend to curl up over time. And turn off the room light.

Download the camera chip into your computer’s photo editor, select each image, hit “Negative” and convert that to Grayscale, then start fiddling with the Brightness, Contrast, all that stuff. Job done.

                                                         >>>>>>>>