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My latest photography project has been to scan all my old negatives. Let’s be straight here, this is no small task. I’ve got a couple of thousand at least to get through. But that scanning over and over again isn’t the hardest part. The really hard part is seeing what I was like as a photographer twenty years ago.

I was an aspiring enthusiast who couldn’t afford any real equipment. I had no idea what to do with my f-stop – I always tried to shoot wide open for light reasons, not for Depth of Field. The shutter speed was more important to me because I was always afraid of things being blurry. I also had a crappy flash and never moved it off-camera.

Sigh … just looking at them now really makes me cringe. I had even done a couple of weddings back then. I’ve scanned those photos and I thought of sending them to the brides, but I just can’t do it. I can’t stand how bad they are compared to the kind of photos I take today.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying the effort to see the old photos of my family and friends from about 1990 to 2001 (when I went digital). I’ve been posting some to Facebook and enjoying the comments – “I can’t believe my hair!”, “When was that shot?”, “Look how thin I was!”

This is going to take months. With the scanner I got (EPSON V370 Photo), each negative takes about 3 minutes to scan. The results are nice (much nicer than the scanner I started with), but every negative has flaws. I’m cleaning up the good shots and making a lot of use of the Adjustment Brush in Lightroom.

This particular one is one of my old favorites. I’ve had it hanging in my study for years – printed from the negative. I took in Lake Tahoe, NV on top of Mt. Heavenly ski resort (where we have a timeshare) in the summer of 1997. I don’t have any of the technical information except that it was ISO200.