About the service
I take in negatives and slides in whatever shape they have survived: rolls still in their paper sleeves, strips cut into fours, mounted transparencies, a shoebox from the top of a wardrobe that nobody has opened since the last move. Before anything is scanned I look at the material on a light panel and tell you plainly what will come back and what will not, so the scope is agreed on facts rather than hopes. Then comes the cleaning: soft brush, blower, anti-static wipe where the emulsion allows it, and nothing wet on anything brittle.
Scanning is done frame by frame, at a resolution the source can actually carry. There is no sense in pushing a grainy 35 mm frame to a huge number, because the only thing that grows is the grain. After that I work on the picture itself: scratches, spots, glue marks and fingerprints are retouched out, faded dyes are brought back, and the colour cast that four decades of storage left behind is taken off. My retouching is conservative on purpose: I return the frame to the way it looked, I do not paint in things that were never there.
When frames belong together, one wedding, one holiday, one year, I match them so the set reads as an album instead of a pile of unrelated files. The finished work goes onto your own drive, named by date and event, sorted into folders, with a simple index so anyone in the family can find a frame without asking me. Originals come back in archival sleeves in the order I received them, and a large family archive is handled in batches with partial delivery along the way, so you see results while the work is still running.
— inspection of the material and an honest estimate before the work and the price are agreed;
— gentle dust and static removal, no wet treatment of fragile emulsion;
— frame-by-frame scanning at a resolution the source justifies;
— retouching of scratches, spots and marks of age, colour recovery on faded frames;
— one consistent look across a series, captions and a catalogue organised by date;
— files handed over on your own drive, originals returned in archival sleeves;
— usual turnaround one to two weeks by volume, with a fast batch route for large family archives;
— film with mould or wound turns stuck together is not always recoverable, and I promise no result on frames like these;
— I never cut or discard originals: they go back to their owner;
— I digitise only the client's own family archive; photographs belonging to other people or material under someone else's rights I do not take, and family pictures are never published anywhere.
Scanning is done frame by frame, at a resolution the source can actually carry. There is no sense in pushing a grainy 35 mm frame to a huge number, because the only thing that grows is the grain. After that I work on the picture itself: scratches, spots, glue marks and fingerprints are retouched out, faded dyes are brought back, and the colour cast that four decades of storage left behind is taken off. My retouching is conservative on purpose: I return the frame to the way it looked, I do not paint in things that were never there.
When frames belong together, one wedding, one holiday, one year, I match them so the set reads as an album instead of a pile of unrelated files. The finished work goes onto your own drive, named by date and event, sorted into folders, with a simple index so anyone in the family can find a frame without asking me. Originals come back in archival sleeves in the order I received them, and a large family archive is handled in batches with partial delivery along the way, so you see results while the work is still running.
— inspection of the material and an honest estimate before the work and the price are agreed;
— gentle dust and static removal, no wet treatment of fragile emulsion;
— frame-by-frame scanning at a resolution the source justifies;
— retouching of scratches, spots and marks of age, colour recovery on faded frames;
— one consistent look across a series, captions and a catalogue organised by date;
— files handed over on your own drive, originals returned in archival sleeves;
— usual turnaround one to two weeks by volume, with a fast batch route for large family archives;
— film with mould or wound turns stuck together is not always recoverable, and I promise no result on frames like these;
— I never cut or discard originals: they go back to their owner;
— I digitise only the client's own family archive; photographs belonging to other people or material under someone else's rights I do not take, and family pictures are never published anywhere.
