In early 2002, I added a Nikon film scanner to my digital darkroom. Scanning nearly 30 years of negatives proved to be a daunting task, but a worthwhile one also. If I never took another photograph in my life, I could keep busy just browsing and printing the resulting 20,000+ scanned files. The massive scanning project lasted from about April through November of 2002. All weekend, and for many hours in the evenings after work, the grinding of the film scanner almost drove my family nuts. But then it was over; the images were scanned, organized, and backed up; the original negatives went into the attic; and the film cameras went into a drawer, never to return.
Having my complete photographic history available on my desktop for the first time was amazing. I came to the conclusion that during the "dark" years when I was without darkroom access and only shooting color print film, as a photographer I
became extremely frustrated trying to "take black and white photographs on color film." But once those old negatives were scanned, all of those "lost shots" could be salvaged--the color negatives scanned, converted to black and white positives, and manipulated in the digital darkroom. Every time I ran negatives through the scanner, it was like Christmas! I even found some "classic" images among 15 or so rolls of black and white film I had exposed on Catalina Island in 1984, but had never printed from.
[ photograph above: Obsidian, 1994 ]
