Do you save all negatives?

[Jim Jones]

Sometimes the information recorded in negatives is valuable, even though the image is too poor in quality to be worth displaying. Broken or obsolete equipment can be used to repair or improvise newer gear. Even the eyeglasses I'm wearing at the moment have been repaired with parts (and duct tape) from otherwise useless glasses.

[Brian Ellis]

Short answer: No

Long answer: There's a theory (valid IMHO) that you can't really judge the merits of a photograph shortly after it was made because at that time you remember what you were looking for when you made the photograph. And if it doesn't accomplish what you wanted you figure it isn't a good photograph so you throw it away without seeing other possibilities in it. But if you look at the photograph years down the road you forget what you originally wanted and you can see possibilities with it that originally escaped you. Which is probably a good reason to keep all your negatives.

Unfortunately practical storage space/clutter considerations sometimes prevent that, in which case you have to strike a compromise between space/clutter and the desirability of keeping everything. For me the compromise is to scan all my negatives, store the scans digitally (in four different storage mechanisms), keep the negatives for a while (year or so) then throw most of them away. I keep only the ones that I exhibited or otherwise liked well enough to print. If I thought my heirs were going to care about my photographs I probably wouldn't trust them to digital storage systems. But I don't think they're going to care and I'm comfortable that during my lifetime there will always be a way to read the scans.

This all relates only to my "fine art" (heh heh) photographs. The family negatives I keep forever, I figure they might interest someone a long time from now, when there might be no way to retrieve the scans.

[Shootar401]

I save all the negatives, no exceptions. A bunch of negatives in sleeves in a 3-ring binder doesn't take up much space, nor does a small portable hard drive for my scans. They all fit nicely in my safe deposit box.

[Kirk Gittings]

I am much more liberal about flawed negatives I keep. I used to toss more and then scanning and PS came along. Many that I (now regretfully) previously tossed could have been repaired with current tools.

[Andrew O'Neill]

I turn the duds into supports for carbon tissue.

Me too. But before I got into carbon, I dumped them. Now I regret that.

[Ari]

I toss the blank ones, very faint ones, etc.
When I get down about my work, the percentage of tossed film goes way up.

[Ed Richards]

I also scan them all and create a high rez and a small JPG of each. I fill all the JPGs and organize them with Lightroom as an index to the negatives. I only keep the high rez scans of the best, but since I have the negative and the index file for all, I can go back and make a new scan if I decide I want to work with one I did not like at the time of original scanning.

[Jess C]

I tend to keep them all. Even the blank ones have a use for measuring base + fog.

[SpeedGraphicMan]

If a severely scratch an old one they make good focusing negs for making enlagements.

Especially since it is so dang hard to use a grain focusing aid with "grainless" large format.

[slackercruster]

No I didn't them all.

I kept the ones I liked and some maybes. No regrets. But I have lost lots of my work over 40 years. Lots of regrets for losing stuff. Crazy, but I've some some of my best stuff!! Do better than me.