As a father of 3 small but fast growing children, the importance of recording their development and childhood for future is regularly on my mind.
Fortunately in the age of digital photography, the issues is easy with high resolution digital cameras and large storage devices readily available.
One aspect of our business that seems to always be growing is the process of transferring old photos and negatives to digital images, not only for enhancement but to stop the onset of deterioration which is inherent to both traditional photographs and films.
There are many factors relevant to a good quality scan, however the biggest and often the easiest, is to always scan from the original film or slide rather than the printed photograph. It’s important to remember the photograph is only an inferior print of the original film which has inherently lost much of the details of the transfer (think of it like a cassette copy of a CD).
Despite the many advancements in photo scanning equipment, it can’t touch the contrast and depth contained in an original film (negative, slide, positive, transparency).
Do yourself and your family a favour, when you’re looking to spend money on digitising your photographic history, locate the original film and benefit from the dramatic quality improvement.