Hi, new to the group. I have aquired some negatives of social events and daily life. Some of them have information of who is in the picture etc, but there are many with little to no inforrmation. I am planning on digitzing the collection, should I only copy images that I can add information to?
You need to be a member of British Photographic History to add comments!
Replies
I recently bought a set of 850 6x6 negatives and I decided to scan them all. After examining the scans I finally chose to concentrate on 155, mostly showing people, which I found most interesting.
So, in the course of this, I discovered that the negatives were taken by the same photographer between 1960 and 1964. Each negative was in its own sleeve and the photographer had meticulously annotated them with the subject and date. I was very lucky to have that information because now I know the locations, the photographer's and the familiy members' names (not surname unfortunately), where the photographer worked, where the family visited on holiday, where they lived within a few street, even the make of camera used, an MMP Microflex.
The remainder of the negatives were shots of the dogs and lots of boring landscapes, like the ones I have taken myself over the years.
I've printed about 130 of the photographs to put into a sort of tribute album.
Here are a couple of those not featuring people, I was a bit worried because the children depicted may still be alive, perhaps I'm being too cautious.
Pinewood Studios, Iver Heath, during the filming of Anthony and Cleopatra.
GPO Tower from Euston Road May 63
RTA outside the Bull and Bush April 1963
Euston Road from roof (of Babcock House, no. 209)
In the past I have bought lots of negatives and slides with no provenance but with a bit of perseverance I've managed to uncover some interesting information about them. Quite often there are some which are interesting in their own right.
Thanks, wow they are cool. I am working my way through them (very slowly there are 200,000) and am able to find enough info to make the images searchable for others now and for the ones I can't they are still cool images that need to be seen.
It might be good to digitise the lot for various reasons: when you study the digital images as positives at high res, you might see clues about where the mystery photos were taken; or relate them to the negs for which you do have info; also you can do reverse image searchs online (via Google Lens for example) with the jpegs; or share them on various local history forums etc, asking for help; etc.
Thank you