The Last Roll of Oldies

Well, I finally got the last roll of oldies developed. I started out with nearly 20 rolls of exposed film my wife discovered packed away and over the past several months had a few developed at a time. This is the last of them and here’s one of the better shots showing another joint birthday party culminating with Noah (6) on the left and Rachael (3) on the right, candles flaming and just waiting for the “Happy Birthday” to end so they can blow them out. Since they are now 16 and 13 respectively, that would make it the year 2002, ten years ago.

Now there is no way anyone can say this is a great work of photographic art. I have no idea what camera or film was used. If I had to guess I would say it was probably the Canon Snappy LX II loaded with Kodak Gold 200 or 400. Shooting into the glass doors of a china cabinet with a flash certainly was not ideal composition but they are still great pictures because of the memories they evoke.

The fact that it took ten years to finally get developed and the photos are still there looking like they do is amazing but what is even more amazing is that 50 years or even 100 years from now the negatives will still be there (assuming they are not lost or otherwise damaged) and ready to provide the same image to whoever wants to see it. It could be scanned again or even printed if there is still any photographic paper around. 

My wife & I recently examined some 40-50 year old negatives that looked just as they did when they were developed a half a century ago. I know there is supposed to be some degradation over time but we couldn’t see any, and these negatives were not specially stored or anything that might contribute to their pristine condition. With digital technology changing every few months and formats becoming obsolete every few years in favor of something better or cheaper I often wonder what will become of all our digital images in the future, not to mention all the lost or damaged SD cards and crashed hard drives that were never backed up.