Nothing really seems unusual about this picture until you look at the license plate on the car. The number is backwards. For those of you following family, this is a picture of the Anderson's. Dorothy with the purse, Shirley with the gun, Judy, and Lloyd holding Larry Gene, Dorothy's son.One of the rewarding tasks one might do is scan old negatives. Yes, negatives. The price of this type of scanner is now under $200. Have you checked your local photo store to find out what a print from a black and white negative costs? One site thinks it is a deal for greater than $15.00 for one print of one negative! Let me see: 200 divided by 15 is about 13. That means that if I had sent the 157 black and white negatives to them, I would have spent 157 x $15= way too much!!!
The idea of getting a scanner presented itself when Tom's brother told me how much it cost to process negatives. I contacted a professional archivist who I had several scanners based on the jobs she was doing. She contacted her guru and he suggested a few different ones. Since I am not doing books or glass negatives, the less than $200 fit my purposes. It also comes with a refresh program. The user guide is loaded with the scanner program. You don't have to load the elements for photo enhancing if you have a program you really like on your computer.
Although the scanner will scan photos, documents just like any scanner, it also does slides, 35mm negatives, and black and white negatives as images into your computer. Other features are PDF and email. One has a choice of how you want them saved; I use jpeg for photos.
I have the kind of personality that prefers to try to set up equipment on my own; if all else fails, I will read the directions. I did go to a well written manual to find out why I couldn't get the black and white negatives to print. I was in the wrong mode, I needed to change to home mode. I found this information quickly through the index.
I recently scanned death certificates in PDF. The first one I sent was a single. She wrote to say she had received it. The next was a thirteen page document. She is either really busy, or her computer blew up with all the information and is in its own grave yard!
Yesterday, I looked at a negative before I scanned it. It looked like a lady holding a birthday cake. I knew this woman was born in the winter and there wasn't any snow on the ground. It was in the era of no flash. The preview of the picture showed her holding a set of silverware in a box! What I thought were candles were forks, knives, and spoons! Another looked like a person painting. I could 'see' the paint can and a strip of lighter paint on the side of the house. It appeared the person was bending over to load her brush. It turned out the light paint was a eve trough and the paint can was a butter churn! The person was crunched down talking to a child. The picture was poor, there was a long shadow over both of them, I did not print it. This helps us understand that once you have previewed the negative, you can decide if you want to save it (scan) to your computer.
Try using the brightness feature to be certain you have the negative in the right way. Look for things like back ward license plates on cars. You may not know the area and will need to look at other objects in the print to be sure.
We all know that when we scan pictures, they will need to be cropped. Sometimes one needs to brighten or do a contrast to get the photo to be worth your effort. Many of the negatives I am scanning were taken during a time when flash wasn't used outside; it was considered a major expense to buy flash bulbs. It is also a time when people forgot to wind the film OR they have their finger on the lens!
A picture of great grandparents holding a baby is worthless if great grandma's face is an image of a finger! Maybe you can save Great Grandpa Bloom with a crop. OR do you want to tell your children, "See this body with the fat ankles? Those are your great grandmother's legs."
How much time are you willing to put into the project? How many boxes of negatives do you have? Are any of the envelopes marked? Or is it all going to be surprise! The more organized the negatives the less time it will take because you are going to get a 'run' on pictures taken at the same time. I did 20 slides this morning, four at a time; the scanner saves them separately. I was only disappointed because I had 3 slides of a patch of watermelons. I was scanning and doing something else at the same time in another room and was going to wait and do clean up all at once. Slides do not require cropping, except in the case of multiples of still images, like watermelon.
How are you going to store these on your computer even if you move them later? Would it work for you to store each family together with a three or four letter prefix? I do MEL for Mellem, AND for Anderson, LUND for Lundberg, and so forth. I make a new folder each time I run into another family. This helps me keep them sorted as I go rather than have a sea of numbers and no idea what belongs with what. Genealogy is confusing enough without all those loose threads. Remember to save them as a named image and delete the img154.
As for time? I would strongly suggest thinking in terms of at least five minutes per negative. Do a few at a time, write what the negative is on an index card, whether you save it or not. Put the index card into the envelope with the negatives and mark it scanned and date it. Finish the image completely and store like with like. The folders I have saved with images will be moved to an external hard drive for us on other computers. When I finish with the Les Johnson slides, I will make CD copies and send them to the children. I have already had payment. Marc wrote to say it was nice to see what his mother looked like when she was young. He also had no idea what his grandfather and great grandfathers looked like. Paid in full.
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