Sorting the Snapshots

A sudden storm of flints at Holkham Hall, Norfolk 2001

(or is it Houghton Hall, Norfolk?)

It's been some years, now, since I last used film.  I was quickly impressed by the potential of digital photography, though for quite a while I did distrust "digital" as a medium: the resolution of affordable digital cameras was too low for enlargements of any size and, above all, the preservation of digital files seemed unreliable compared with film (it still does, come to that).  I continued to do my "serious" work on medium-format film which I scanned and printed digitally.

As well as medium-format, right up until about 2004 I was still getting through a fair bit of 35mm film, mainly for family album purposes.  Not by professional standards, of course -- my peak was about 45 films in 1997 -- but enough to pose a problem of storage and organisation.  As I never developed or printed my own colour "snaps", rather than neat and easy-to-file contact sheets and negative pages, I have boxes, drawers and carrier-bags full of those annoying paper wallets of 6" x 4" prints.  They pop up everywhere.

Sorting them out has been at the back of my mind for years, in that deep-storage space that contains all the other tedious jobs like fixing the cracks in the ceiling, painting the as-yet-unpainted plaster walls in the kitchen extension, re-carpeting the stairs, washing the car, and a dozen other long-postponed chores that reduce me to glum despair if I am ever foolish enough to open the door that conceals them, like an overstuffed glory-hole under the stairs.  Yes, we have one of those, too.

This week, I finally got down to it: I made up my mind to tackle the snapshots.

I decided the only way to approach it was as a sorting job.   Step one: find and gather together all the print wallets -- easier than it sounds.  Even after the main drawers had been emptied, and crates lugged in, various strays and sub-stashes in cardboard boxes kept appearing on shelves and inside cupboards to inflate the hoard.

Having got them all in one place, the first task was to identify the year and month of each batch, and write this information on the outside of each wallet with a felt-pen.  Luckily, I had been sensible enough to annotate about 90% of them with dates and locations, so this was a simple, if tedious chore.  To identify the year and month of the other unannotated 10% became detective work: how old did the children appear to be, what time of year was it, could I remember where it was?

A complicating factor was the use of different cameras in parallel and at different intensities.  My main snapshot camera was an Olympus Mju, and multiple films might pass through it in a single holiday week.  Other cameras might get only intermittent use, and one film might span many months.

I sorted the wallets into tottering year piles, and fine-sorted them into something like date order.  I then finally numbered each wallet within each year, so that any prints removed for, say, album purposes could be annotated on the back as "1996/5", and subsequently re-matched with the correct negative sleeve.  Simple, but effective.  No doubt undiscovered troves of prints have yet to turn up, but these will become "1996/5b", etc.

The next step will be to fill several bin bags with rejects.  Anything that is not at least a Grade B album shot, or irreplaceable evidence of that time we saw Elvis in Lyme Regis, is going to go.  Any attempts at "art" which have not previously been scanned will go, too.  In this lifetime I will never get around to reconsidering 20 years worth of 35mm negatives.

Does anyone know if standard photo prints count as "paper" for recycling purposes?

Then will come the fun part: the family album that stalled in 1996 will be brought up to date.  It seems a very appropriate thing to be doing, in the year one child turns 21 and the other 18.    Actually, I will probably scan the real "keepers" and make Blurb books of them, as this seems the best route in terms of both usability and preservation (I'm only too aware of what happens to colour snaps in albums).  The negatives and the remaining prints will go into archival boxes, until the hopefully far-off day comes when someone else has to decide what to do with them.

Next up: those cracks in the ceiling...

Flinging pebbles at Southwold, Suffolk 2002

(or is it Aldeburgh, Suffolk?)