Scan prints or negatives ?

[andrew gardiner]

I like to print all my ( mostly colour) photographs optically and have a great relationship with an old fashioned lab here in London. However I have recently been wondering whether I shouldn't scan in some of my best images just for back up really. My question is should I just scan in the negatives or make a professional scan of a perfect 10x8 print so that I have a file that includes all the hard work in the darkroom? Any thoughts?

[vinny]

Have the negs scanned. Print resolution is much lower and won't do you a ton of good when trying to make prints from those files.

[timparkin]

I like to print all my ( mostly colour) photographs optically and have a great relationship with an old fashioned lab here in London. However I have recently been wondering whether I shouldn't scan in some of my best images just for back up really. My question is should I just scan in the negatives or make a professional scan of a perfect 10x8 print so that I have a file that includes all the hard work in the darkroom? Any thoughts?

I know of fine art photographers that scan the prints because they want the tonality of that a wet print gives (and the possible blur for that matter although I know people have got sharper results scanning prints from 35mm than they could get from the film directly).

Tim