Old Negatives That Never Got Printed

[Rob Pietri]

I went through my files the other day and pulled a negative I shot back in 1977. I had shot two other photographs of the same Victorian house and those two got printed and worked very well. However, this one I passed over, thinking it was n ot as exciting. Well, I was wrong. Here it is, 25 years later, I took some time to do a print and it seems to have a stronger visual impact then the other two! So the next time you have a negative you don't think has worked at the time, jus t file it away. Don't throw it out. You may surprise yourself 20 years from now!

[Daniel luu Van Lang]

Hi Rob, I'm very happy to read your post! it seems to be the difference between a negative and digital shot! You'd probably have cancelled the second and loose it forever, so, long life to the silver photo please!!

[Huib]

Well Rob,

It centainly doesn't take 25 years...

Last few month I 'discovered' that I'm not always happy with the result when I print the photographs shortly after the exposure. Negatives that where on the shelf for a few weeks or reprinted give far more pleasing results. I do not say that all are better.

I think that the vivid memory of what I photographed interferes with the printing process.

Huib

home.plex.nl/~hsmeets

[Brian Ellis]

The phenomenon you describe - discoverning months or even years later that a negative you didn't print actually makes an interesting photograph - is pretty interesting and I think most of us have had a similar experience. It was discussed at some length in a workshop I attended a couple years ago. The consensus seemed to be that when we view a contact sheet or proof shortly after making the photograph, we remember what we were expecting from the photograph at the time it was made. If the proof doesn't meet our expectations we discard it without considering whether it has other merits. When we look at the contact sheet or proof months or years later, we've forgotten what it was we originally expected to get and instead just look at what we got. Often that's something pretty interesting but we were blinded to that by what we originally thought was our failure.

[Carl Weese]

In an interview somewhere the brillian photographer Josef Sudek mentions that he kept a strict rule to never, ever, print a negative until at least six months had passed. He says he wanted to relate to the negative, not the original event, when printing from it, and the delay was essential for this. In his books you often see the titling information showing a date for the negative and another often ten years later for the print.

[Tony Galt]

Indeed... recently I found a box of negatives I shot when I was in high school i n the late fifties, probably with my first adjustable camera, a Super Richoflex for which I had slowly saved up $20. There were some shots of Red Rock Canyon, a nd the Alabama Hills near Whitney Portals in California that I would have been v ery proud of having taken today. The prints I made by scanning these negatives a re far better than any darkroom print I made then, or could make now. The Richof lex lens was a little soft around the edges, but otherwise I'm proud of these sh ots.

[Tim Klein]

Interesting thread, especially Carl's response! I thought I was the only one who had a time limit rule for printing my images (3 months in my case).

I usually do a quick edit of my negs and transparencies right away, but I only get rid of the blatantly obvious losers. I wait at least a month before performing a true edit of a session. While I might print an inkjet proof of a promising image (I have to live with some images for a while to clarify my vision of what the final print should look like. I dry mount it and hang it, then make notes and comments right on the proof and mount), I almost never print a final image until my "3 month rule" is met.

I've made exceptions only a couple of times for images that captured a "moment". In each case, I returned to those images after the 3 months were up and reprinted them. The reprinted images are both technically and aesthetically superior in every case.

[Andre Noble]

Rob, this happened to me just this weekend, how coincidental! Mine was a 35mm portrait of a women in Siberia in an open fieled taken 10 years ago. I think maturation has something to do with it.

[Pierre Robitaille]

Very interesting thread. For some time now I saw an analogy with wine...You have to wait at least a few months before drinking it. It is funny because my best prints always seem to come from last year's negatives...

[David R Munson]

Last week I spent several days printing a group of negatives from last year that I had shot for an assignment but didn't print because I didn't think they were good enough. Now I look at what I handed in instead and I swear I must have been out of my mind.