So sometime after we moved to California I decided to contact our
wedding photographer to see if she would be willing to sell the negatives of
our wedding. She was and I came into possession of a tiny manila envelope that
containing medium format negatives of one of the most important days of my
life. Upon inspection I realized that the negatives were overall in good shape
(though dusty) and just needed some attention. So I searched the internet for a
service that would scan in negatives for a reasonable price with excellent results.
After some comparison shopping and trying a few different scanning services, I found ScanCafe.
Having always been interested in cameras and photography (being the
photo editor of the college paper and all) and working as a
youth sports photographer, I had thousands of negatives and chromes that needed
to be scanned in. So I sent in a test batch a few negatives to be scanned in.
It took awhile but the results were very good. So I sent another batch in. Then
finally I sent the precious wedding negatives in. So far they’ve scanned in
about 2000 negatives and chromes for me and the results have been very, very good.
Most of the inconsistencies have to do with the originals and not the scanning
work.
You can see the results of the wedding scans here.
They do need some post-processing work, but that’s to be expected. The point
is, now I have these memories digitally, in a format that never has to go away.
Pair that with an online photo service (I use SmugMug)
and the photos could be saved forever (or until the world forgets about me,
whichever comes first). The photo above is from our wedding. I have manipulated it in Photoshop to create the B&W effect with the flowers in color that you see here. I love how I know have these memories forever as opposed to just a photo album that could be damaged, lost or destroyed.
[Side Note: SmugMug
recently used one of my photos in their introductory slide show. So here is the
photo
of a youth playing baseball next to all these amazing photos of landscapes and
nature.]
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