Last summer, my husband Paul and I bought a condominium in Norwich with the plan to move there in the summer of 2018. We gave ourselves a year to sort through all our “stuff,” to distribute (toss out?) much of it, and to get our house in shape to sell. That year started January 2017, and so did we!

How to get started? I asked myself, only to answer with another question: What was the worst project to get out of the way? Family photos, I decided. I have boxes and boxes of photographs, some in albums, some in negatives only, and some just loose. I can just throw them all out, I thought. But then,  stupidly (?), I looked through an album or two, glanced at the negatives, and found some fun pictures of my family, houses we lived in and vacations we took together – “and wallowed in nostalgia” to borrow a phrase from my friend and school mate, Curt Blanchard!

Then with no warning, we got two feet of snow in March! Paul and I abandoned our focus on sorting and went cross country skiing. That led to me reminiscing about the early days of skiing and Ford Sayre, and I was hooked.

 

The few pictures that Mother and Dad printed were put in an album (yes, they had a darkroom in our basement on Cliff Street in Norwich), but many of the pictures were still in negative form.

I certainly wasn’t going to pay to have all those negatives printed – and although I also had had a darkroom when Paul and I lived in Lebanon, I didn’t have the time to spend setting it up and printing all those negatives. So what to do? I googled “scanning negatives” and found several ways to turn these negatives into positives. Sure enough, it worked. Now, all I have to do is figure out how to process the positives in Photoshop to get better pictures.

Even though there is a lot more I can do in Photoshop, I realized that this quick fix brings back the memory without spending too, too much time. Because after all I have lots of sorting to do!!!

Here is the process I went through using a picture of my brother Peter jumping off the old Dartmouth Ski Jump.

1.  Negative scanned directly: I put the negative in the middle of the platen of the scanner, covered it with a piece of white typing paper, and covered that whole thing with a very bright, daylight bulb that has very little heat. Heat will bubble up the negative and make it impossible to lie flat on the platen. Then I simply scanned it, saving the file to my MacIntosh computer – one of the options in the scanning process.

2. I put the file into Photoshop and inverted it:

3. I applied the white and black eye droppers from the levels layer in Photoshop:

4. Then I cropped the photo:

Voilà! A print that triggers great memories of the days when Peter was jumping for Hanover High School.

Next step: learn how to clean this up in Photoshop and make a real print!

And now, on to more sorting.

Please click on the title of this post to leave a comment.