Precautions for Handling Film Negatives

Series Summary

As digital photography takes over, traditional film processing is gradually being phased out. No longer do people get the thrill of watching a photo develop right before your eyes in a darkroom. They just pull them up on a computer and there they are. But photographs printed the old-fashioned way are somehow still magical. The tones, especially for black and white photos, are much richer than those from digital images. This is the reason why traditional printing continues to have a stronghold in the art world. A job well done in the darkroom can't be beat!

In this series of free photography videos from our experienced photo printer, you will learn about working with contact sheets. Our professional photographer will discuss how to file and archive contact sheets, as well as what photo paper you should use and how to sleeve the negatives once you are finished. Contact sheets help you to decide which photos to enlarge, so making a quality contact sheet is a key part of the enlargement process.

Video Transcript

"So after your film is dried, and you want to make sure your film is dry, don't be in a rush doing this stuff. Because if you even start handling film that's even a little bit wet, the possibility of totally ruining your negative is there. The other thing you want to make sure is that you're wearing gloves. It's a little bit uncomfortable at first, but you'd be surprised how easy it is to mess up a negative with just your fingernails or your hand. And it's always the best negative, the best picture on the roll. Sort of a Murphy's Law of what goes on in the dark room. So what you want to do is hold your film like this, I like a light table. And this is a pretty expensive light table, but you can buy very inexpensive one, again on the Internet, at a camera store, maybe thirty, forty dollars tops. And first I visually inspect my negatives, obviously they came out, I'm happy. The next step I'm going to get ready to do is to cut my negatives, I have a nice pair of scissors, make sure I didn't drink too much coffee, and I being to cut my negs."