Negative scanning - When and Why?

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Negative scanning - When and Why?

One of the services I perform for clients—and enjoy the most—is scanning old prints, negatives, and slides. This process can bring new life to images that have been sitting in boxes or albums for years. In some cases, it allows people to see photos they may have never seen before.

Not only is it a wonderful way to revisit and share old family photos, but it is also the best way to ensure their preservation, especially when it comes to unique, one-of-a-kind prints, slides, or negatives.

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My Legacy Project - My Grandfather Boris Lenoff

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My Legacy Project - My Grandfather Boris Lenoff

Permanent.org is a personal legacy archive platform created to enable people to preserve family history, tell their stories, and most importantly, ensure that it is safely passed on and available to others for years to come.

They recently launched a project they called the Legacy Lab, which encouraged participants to do a start-to-finish archive on a particular family member. I’m still in the process of doing mine, which is on my maternal grandfather Boris Lenoff, who was a portrait photographer who had his studio on the Coney Island boardwalk in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

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Should you keep your old negatives?

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Should you keep your old negatives?

People are always asking me what to do with their old negatives. It is not an easy question to answer. Most of the scanning I do for clients is of their older prints, anywhere from twenty to a hundred years old. If the prints are in good shape, they can yield a perfectly good scan for most of the uses we would want them for.

So do you throw away all the negatives you have?

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Become a Better Photo Editor… and a better story-teller and photographer

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Become a Better Photo Editor… and a better story-teller and photographer

Photo editing is story-telling. When we edit our photos, whether it’s for a photo album or just our general library, we are telling stories of an event, a trip, a person’s life or even just a great day we had.

As part of Save your Photos Month, I will be giving a free 20 minute webinar on how to become a better photo editor. I have over 20 years as a professional photo editor and will talk about the editing methods I have found to be the most effective, ways to train your eye and mind to work efficiently, and utilizing best practices to achieve consistent results with all your projects.

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Webinar - How to properly set up and start working with Apple Photos and iCloud

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Webinar - How to properly set up and start working with Apple Photos and iCloud

What you'll learn in this apple training: Apple Photos and iCloud is an easy to use and maintenance-free photo-system for your iPhone and Mac computer, but if it isn’t set up correctly from the beginning you can end up with a real mess and even risk losing photos. It would be nice if Apple did a better job of explaining how it works and how to set it up, but they don’t…

I have been working with my personal clients over the

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Life during crisis - Life in Focus

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Life during crisis - Life in Focus

I’ve always wondered how people get through wars and other frightening times that can occur during one’s lifetime. My mother and father lived through the depression and then later WWII. My grandmother was a medical practitioner treating German Soldiers during WWI and then later had to endure the Spanish Flu which came just as the war was ending. My God what a time!

Last week I found myself, like most of us, cycling through a range of emotions: fear, hope, hopelessness, despair, denial and as much acceptance as I could muster. As both the parent of a teenage boy and the son of a very at-risk mother in an asssited living, every decision I find myself facing carries many potential consequences. I get absolutely exhausted just trying to navigate what used to be the simplest daily decisions in my life.

But I don’t really have to tell this to anyone do I?

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Preparing to scan your old print collection?

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Preparing to scan your old print collection?

People ask me all the time about the best way to scan their old prints. If you have taken on the role of family photo historian, you will need to do some scanning at some point.

You may still have boxes of loose prints or stacks of old photo albums, and while you know that scanning is the best way to preserve them, it can be hard to get started.

Let’s break it down to some manageable steps and take a look at some options to get things going

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…scanned from my archive. My grandmother Fanny

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…scanned from my archive. My grandmother Fanny

My grandmother Fanny was one of the sweetest and kindest people I ever knew, almost to a fault. She lived for her family and friends and would literally do anything to help or support them, but as a result I always wondered about her own happiness.

She raised my mother and her brother Jerry, and helped my grandfather Boris run his photo studio on the boardwalk, just downstairs from their ocean view apartment in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. I of course have dozens of photos my grandfather took of her, posing almost demurely for the camera in his studio, on the boardwalk, the beach or their roof (otherwise known as tar beach).

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Creating a Legacy Collection for Yourself

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Creating a Legacy Collection for Yourself

I work with many clients, and as one might expect the collections I am seeing are getting bigger and bigger. I am currently working on two personal photo collections over 100k images and that is not uncommon.

The question then becomes, where is this going and do we really want to go there?

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