Film Negatives


My father loved taking photos of us as a family from when my brother and I were tiny little people till when we were in college, in his trusty Canon SLR camera... don't ask me about the model, I have no idea. We accumulated a number of film negatives from these photo ops, and since he was a hoarder and my mother, a sometime sentimentalist, they were able to keep these negatives in one place.

About 20 years ago, I found them stacked along with other documents and asked my mother if I could keep them. I stashed them in a box filled with silica gel and didn't do anything about it. A month ago, I saw them again and thought to myself, I should buy the film negative binders they sell online. Unfortunately, shipping is so prohibitive that I decided to think of something else to store them.

I read online that these negatives can be stored in either polyethylene or polypropylene containers. So, when I found these clearbooks with polypropylene pockets, I got a few and decided to use them instead. I divided each pocket into seven and made running stitches bothways to secure each strip compartment, and voila! I keep them in a pouch filled with silica gel again to help with moisture control.

I'm going through these film negatives, selecting the strips to print so I can give them to my mother so she can enjoy reminiscing clearer and bigger copies. The old photos are now faded and yellowed. I'm looking forward to a film negative scanner so I can have these preserved digitally. I hope I can find a good one.

Ms. Ilyn is a licensed architect who decided that teaching arts and crafts, or making them, is way more fulfilling than dealing with contract documents, estimates and technical specifications. She taught Architectural Drafting and Painting to High School Students for five years, and Arts for Pre-K to Grade 3 Pupils for three years. Now, she's back to dealing with the nitty gritty of architecture, but the meditative aspect of papercrafting remains unchanged.

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