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.

I Just Got Back from School

I will share with you what my students were working on for the last 11 weeks. It sounds very grand, but it's actually just 11 hours total because we're only working for an hour every week. It's an After School Activity at Brent-IRRI in Los Baños, Laguna, and it's on Scrapbooking and Photography. Sound a bit much? Yeah, I think so too. Maybe next year I'm going to separate those classes.

Anyway, I'm not really a photographer but I know some basic things I could teach the kids like utilizing natural light, effect of the combination of light, shade and shadow in photography, golden hour (but my class was in mid-afternoon so it was just words), rule of thirds, get close to the subject, holding the camera straight, etc. So these are just some samples of what they did:

By Iman Ismail, Fourth Grade

By Isabelle Douthewaite, First Grade

By Xyla Fitzwell, Second Grade

By Anna Heuer, Kindergarten

By Mami Hosen, Third Grade

Aren't they neat? They just used digital point and shoot cameras for this, but for their grade levels, I thought they did really, really well.

The other part of our ASA is Scrapbooking. Below is a stack of scrapbooks they did. They scrapped the photos they took. I prepared the materials for covers and cut the interior pages. They put together the covers and we punched the sides for the binding rings. We didn't really use any fancy brand-named materials. We just want them to experience to make their first ever album.

Instead of patterned paper, we used giftwrapping paper. We used ordinary acid-free glue stick for all the papers, and a different kind of glue for embellishments. I bought a lot of buttons, ribbons, flowers, feathers, transfer letters and sequins in various shapes. There were a lot of leftovers so I divided them to six, bagged them and gave the rest to them. They were sooooooo excited about that. Next year, I think I'm going to let them use 'real' scrapbooking papers.

So, here are the scrapbooks they did.



There will be an exhibit of their works on Friday, April 30. I sure will be there to support them while they present their work. I'm telling you, these are the sweetest, most innocent kids I ever met. And they did some really, really wonderful job.