Don't Focus on Negatives

A few years ago, I was at a local swap meet called Denio's. We often go there for produce, but sometimes I will go there hunting for treasure (or junk). At the time we were interested in vintage suitcases, so we bought a rough condition suitcase for $5 (or I may have talked them down to $4) and brought it home.

Inside the suitcase we found some old photo bulbs (the kind that are single-use) and photo negatives in the tattered envelope shown below. We looked up the address and it was from a department store in San Francisco from the early 1950's. I found a picture of the place online from around the date on the envelope.

All of the negatives looked like this, some in rough condition:

We wanted to see what was on the negatives, so I scanned them with a standard desktop scanner and then we inverted the colors of the scanned image using a photo editing program (I used Microsoft Paint which comes with every Windows PC). The results were that we got to time travel and see what a vacation to Tahoe in 1952 looked like:

One interesting piece was that there was a printed photograph in the box that had water damage on the right half. We were able to see what the rest of the picture looked like by scanning the negative:

Being married to a photographer, I am obviously a fan of taking pictures. What I've recently become a fan of is the picture's ability to let you travel back into time when it was taken. If your memory and creativity allows, you can imagine what it would be like to travel up the road to Tahoe in an almost-new 1940's sedan. The smells of leaded gasoline and pine trees would mix with the simplicity and isolation of an unconnected world. After your trip, you'd return to San Francisco to get all 31 pictures you took developed and printed for $2.16 (plus 7 cents tax).

If you haven't taken pictures recently, take some. You'll record a bit of your own history, and it may last longer than you think. Doing so will freeze a point in time to which you can return later with fondness.