Bin Night

I used to do the bins at Camera Electronic every Thursday night before closing. Seven of 'em, and sometimes they were bursting with refuse. Retail trade generates a phenomenal amount of refuse - every delivery brings layers of cardboard protection that need to be removed form the premises to make room...for more cardboard. There were days when a good portion of the time was spent with a Stanley knife fighting the packaging and most days it won. Note: If you buy photo equipment to take home, you'll most often get it in a manufacturer's carton with ingenious card and foam packing. Unpack carefully and store the boxes and packaging. It does make a difference to the resale price of the gear. But don't fool yourself that you'll be able to duplicate the origami - job the factory did when it comes time to repack it. We can't even do that at the shop... Back to the bins. Every Thurdsay, much the same - then one day an astounding sight. Two of the bins were full of 35mm colour transparencies. Some loose, and some in plastic sleeves. A standard wheelie holds a lot of slides and they are HEAVY. I wondered at it all, and contacted the photographer whose name was on the mounts. What was going on? All correct. He had decided to purge his collection of commercial colour work now that the emphasis was on digital capture. I believe he may have scanned the more important items and just binned the jobs that would never be viable again. I would like to think that he sent the lot through a scanner and does have all his work, but that may not be the case - his decision. Are you in the same position? I am. I have 35mm negatives and slides back to 1966 in storage right now. The negatives were mostly processed by me, and show it - I can trace the development of my fingerprints over the decades by looking at the emulsion. I can also trace the chemical history of Kodak, Fujifilm, Agfa, Ansco, and Perutz during that time, and I can tell you that the only winner is Rochester, New York. Have I scanned everything? I have not - I thought to do it in retirement but found better occupations. I still do scan if I need an image but quite frankly it is as easy to keep sleeves of negatives as it is folders of files. And I do not need to fear thunderstorms or failing disk drives. Will I bin the lot? No. Frankly I have no idea what may prove interesting to my offspring or any other investigators, so I will dodge the responsibility to edit myself before my time. I have read that Edward Weston cleverly constructed his reputation by editing his day book journals but even so, people can see the truth from a lot of other sources. Will you edit yourself? If you do, take the precaution of getting a good Epson V-series scanner from us and digitising your physical image assets. If you cannot face the prospect, guilt your children or nieces and nephews to do it as a project. Even if you are solely digital, you may baulk at the task of deciding what goes and what stays - but if you can bring yourself to work on the pile one little piece at a time you can discover a lot of potential storage space that is filled up with also-rans that are never going to run again. I have decided upon two tiers of storage, and the deep one is rarely accessed unless it is to re-supply a lost shoot to someone whose own storage has corrupted. If I had copious spare time I would follow all those tedious first chapters that we saw in the photo program books about ratings and stars and collections and turn geekier than I am already - but I am retired and too busy for that.