The Long Now Photography Project

From crispyneurons

the visual archeology of kin

Introduction | Phase 1: Scanning | Phase 2: Post-processing

Jesse Bushnell, my maternal great-grandmother, Denver, 1924

[edit] Project Background

I have a box and a set of albums with thousands of pictures that I've taken and/or been given over the pre-digital years. I also have a newer archive of digital pictures. For a variety of reasons, I wanted to have a single digital archive containing every picture I owned. I started thinking about the best way to do this, but I kept the project on the back burner. I felt, as do others, that digital photography hadn't come far enough yet. And in many ways it still hasn't.

Jesse MacKrell, my maternal grandmother, 1917, age 2 months

Then, a few months ago, my dad approached me. He has a giant collection of family photography, and asked me if there was some way I could convert the collection to digital format. I told him I'd start working on that, because I saw it as the best way to solve a few important problems:

• Most of the photographs in that collection are unique. The negatives for many of the pictures are gone, and if any prints were destroyed, it would be a total loss. By archiving them digitally, everyone in the family could have a copy of the entire archive, thus making destruction unlikely.
• While black-and-white emulsion photography stands up to the test of time fairly well, color pictures decline noticably in just a few years, especially if left in sunlight, and especially if the print employed an older chemical process. Digital photography can't lose quality unless the picture itself is modified or damaged by software.
• Photographic prints have poor metadata. Most pictures don't even have a timestamp, let alone any description of the event or people involved. As time progresses, much of this information is forgotten and lost.

These needs overrode my main objection to going digital: the inferior resolution. So I decided to move forward. In starting this project, I sought to achieve these objectives:

• To have a complete digital archive containing every worthwhile photograph
• To make the scanned photos at least as high quality as the photos my digital camera can produce
• To capture as much relevant metadata for each picture as possible
• To store the pictures in an open, unencumbered, high quality, compressed image format
• To preserve the photographs over a multi-generation (say 100-year) horizon
• To do all this in a reasonably timely and cost-effective manner

Karen Wells, my mother, 1968, age 23

To do this project, I needed only three tools: a decent computer, a flatbed scanner, and image editing software. At first I used a Umax Astra 2100U scanner, though that scanner eventually died and I replaced it with a Canon LiDE. The computer was a flat screen iMac running Mac OS X, although now I use a MacBook Pro. I use Photoshop 7 to post-process the scanned images. This solution works well.

Note: I don't recommend Umax scanners. Umax has poor driver support. For example, no OS X drivers exist. I found the company is fairly immune to customer complaints. Still, the scanner works if you don't mind using the poorly designed Umax VistaScan software. It's a beast but it is possible to use it to scan your photography.

When dealing with a large collection of pictures, it's good to break the overall project into two iterative phases: one for scanning raw images from the source photographic prints, and one for post-processing the scanned images: to clean up, adjust, and optimize the images. I try to keep the two phases in separate sessions. The two tasks are completely independent anyway. Think of the scanning phase as producing raw images, and the post-processing phase as producing final images.

Now, on to the first phase: scanning the photography.