Preserving photos

A few weeks ago while visiting E+T (and clan) the topic of baby photos came up. E+T mentioned that they had been unable to find any photos of T before he was about 5 or so. I thought we had a few, so a few days later (when I managed to remember) J and I had a wander through our old photo albums to see what we could find. Since J and I are going to be parents in a few short months (15.5 weeks today, I believe), we thought it would be nice to have some pictures of what I was like when I’d just popped out.

Turns out we didn’t have any of my photos prior to when I was about 7, although I did have one photo of me, Dad and T in a sling on Dad’s back – so T was about 1, maybe a bit younger.

Mentioned this to Mum, who went through her + Dad’s collection and sent down one album for me to go through, and she’d gone and put some explanatory post-it notes on the outside of the plastic sleeve.

So here’s where it gets tricky. The photos in the album are from about 1968 to 1976. They’ve been printed on what was standard photographic tech for the time, and stored in a decent quality (again, for the time) album. That means: the paper and glue were not acid free.

Add to that the propensity for these old photos to have stuck hard to the glue backing each page, and you’ve got a conservation nightmare.

Fortunately the pages are all removable from the album, so I’m scanning each one separately (600dpi, PNG format) and stashing them on my photography zpool for later working over via The Gimp to separate into separate images. When I’ve got this all done I’ll burn to CD and send out copies.

One thing that’s been quite scary just on flipping through the pages is just how alike Mum and A look. There are several photos of Dad with rather wild sideburns, a few of me running nekkid in the back yard, some colour and b+w shots from Mum and Dad’s wedding… and finally some photos of the northern approach to the Warringah Freeway with a speed limit sign showing “45″ – I guess that must have been pre-decimalisation of the roads.

I’ve got a few long evenings ahead of me to get these pictures ready for consumption, but I know it’ll be worth it in the end.