Episode: 4259
Title: HPR4259: Why digitize photos
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4259/hpr4259.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 22:09:27

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4259 for Thursday, the 28th of November 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Why Digitize Photos.
It is hosted by Henry Cameron and is about seven minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, two reasons to digitize photos is discussed, for a historical archive
or for a personal collection.
Welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
My name is Henley Cameron and I'm your host today.
In Hacker Public Radio Episode 4244, I briefly discussed two methods of digitizing analog
photos.
With a scanner and a repro photo with a digital camera.
Today I want to talk about why digitizing analog photos.
It may appear to be a stupid question.
We'll see what you think in a couple of minutes.
Three years ago, I wrote a chapter in the annual book for a Home Village Association.
The chapter was about life in a small village in the 1930s.
In addition to the text, I had a couple of black and white photos from those days.
I said black and white, but honestly, an 80 year old black and white print is not only
black and white because of aging, type of paper and development method, the black and
white print has colors.
Should the photos in the book chapter be of best black and white photo quality, or should
they reflect the prints as they are at the time of the book release?
There is no right or wrong answer into that question, but it relates to the topic why digitize.
I have found the website preserving history, how to digitally archive and share historical
photographs, documents and audio recordings.
According to the websites are in the show notes.
The main focus for that website is photograph graphs, but as the title states, it's also
about documents and audio.
The website is written and organized as a book and is very comprehensive and a useful resource.
It is a few years old, but is still to a large extent accurate and relevant.
The exact details which equipment formats, settings and so on can be discussed, and
as technology has evolved, what the book describes as the best practice may now have become
more mainstream good practice.
The book has a chapter titled Historical Archive vs Personal Photographic Collection.
The historical archive is about to preserve the object in every detail.
It is applicable for two archives, like museums and other more official public archives.
It means if you take my old black and white prints from 1930s that they should be digitizing
in color and include the full prints with borders.
It also means I should somehow store its dimensions, so that's known afterwards.
From a historical digital archive copy, it's possible to make a copy that is of good photo
quality also.
The other reason to digitize is of personal and family reasons.
In this scope the focus is to have good photos.
It means the original size, borders, scratches, faded colors and so on are not really important
to preserve.
This approach gives better flexibility in method, equipment and settings, and in general
the work will probably be less time consuming.
The drawback is that it is not possible to make an historical archive copy from this
digital copy.
My purpose for digitizing is primarily the personal collection, but still in some cases
I feel I want to do something in between the personal archive and a true digital historical
archive copy, maybe mostly when it comes to preserve colors from prints.
So the takeaway from this episode is that I recommend you to give the purpose of why
you digitize photos, a thought before you start a big digitizing project.
And that you need to balance any desire to make the best possible archive value copy
with the best possible equipment and all time in the world with what is realistic for
you and what is good enough.
And at the other end the happiness to have and share a digital photocopy of any quality
is better than none at all, but considering a bit more of work and attention may improve
the quality significantly.
Finally before I end this episode I also want to give a few remarks to my own episode
number 4244, where I talk about placing the negative or positive in direct contact to
glass under or above it.
There is a risk that this will create Newton rings which can affect the result in a not acceptable
way, so be observant if this will be an issue or not.
The problem that the object is not totally flat in a flatbed scanner should in most cases
not be a problem.
The scanners are normally designed to manage a bit of focus depth, so a bending negative
will probably be fine.
And also some remarks on my repro setup.
My digital camera is mounted on a repro stand.
The stand is similar to the stand used in an analog photo dock room.
The duplication direction is opposite to the one in the analog dock room.
The camera is mounted on the stand while the object to be duplicated is placed on the
base plate.
I have a light table on the base plate when a negative or positive is duplicated so
the light can shine through the negative or positive.
Mounted on the camera, depending on lens, may an extension tube be needed to achieve
the macro distance to duplicate a small object.
Thank you for listening.
Take care and goodbye.
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