Digitizing the Kodak Moment
Posted 4 May 2006, 19:51 in Photography Leave a Comment
In January of 2001, I went on a trip to China with a few college classmates as part SIFE, an international business class project. At that time, digital cameras were still a new concept and I did not want to buy a digital camera that would become obsolete within months. Needless to say, I brought a 35mm Canon point and shoot with me to the trip. Fast forward 5 years later where I am a proud owner of a 8 megapixel Canon Rebel XT SLR camera where digital pictures are archived on my 1 TB Infrant ReadyNas fileserver.
Digital pictures that are archived and backed up properly can last virtually forever. Unlike film, there are no negatives that degrades over time. Digital pictures that are taken today and developed 10 years from now will have the same quality as the day it was taken.
My dilemma. What do I do with the 200 plus pictures that I took in China that’s sitting and collecting dust? How can I archive them digitally so that my precious memories from a place that I probably will never go again last forever? Digitize them!
There are many ways to digitize pictures. For one, I could scan each 4×6 picture that was developed. The downside to this is that the resolution output is low. The other alternative was to scan the negatives. Of course I could buy a negative scanner, but what would I do with it once I’ve scanned all the negatives in my archive? I opted to send my negatives out to Gemega Imaging and had them digitize my negatives.
I have to say that I was quite impressed by the quality that was produced by Gemega Imaging. Based on their service offerings, I opted to have my pictures scanned at the print size of 5×7 with ICE4 enhancement and crop/rotate. Once I sent my negatives to their facility, it took about a week to scan all 200+ negative frames (it would take about 1-2 days for a smaller order). They then provided a secure link to their website so that I could preview their work and give the thumbs up or down. Upon approval, they sent a DVD with my pictures in two file formats: TIFF & JPEG. TIFF is an uncompressed file containing image data as how it was captured during the scanning process. They also provide images in the form of JPEG, so that I could easily upload it to a website or share it across the Internet with my friends.
If you use a scanning service, one thing that you must do when you receive your order is to make a copy of the CD/DVD and store it in a safe place. In fact, you should duplicate it onto an archival grade gold cd or dvd to make sure that your data is safe for years.
Some of my favorite China pictures can be seen in my photo gallery. It may be a bit pricey to digitize an entire box of negatives, but I think its worth the price to digitize pictures that may otherwise be lost forever.
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