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the true destiny of negatives
Carl wrote:
>I want to concur with something Jeffrey just said: If you've got a large
>batch of negatives and realize that you don't know how to handle them for
>good results, the best thing you can do is stick them in the freezer with
>notes on how they were exposed. Then do brand new work 'from scratch' until
>you are getting negatives that print the way you want. It's likely that
>learning process will give you a much better idea of what can be done to
>rescue the earlier negatives, if you still want to bother with them after
>doing the new work.
How long can I leave them in the freezer? They've been stored at room
temperature for about six months, in the dark.
>
>To editorialize for a moment, one of the most frequent traps photographers
>fall into is to spend more time struggling to print existing work when
>they'd be better served to spend the time making new pictures that print
>easily. There's no special virtue in struggling heroically to make prints,
>and no shame in making negatives so good you can print them with your hands
>in your pockets.
I agree. When I finally learned to make a perfect negative for silver
printing, it was a whole new world. Not only did printing go a lot faster,
but the prints were *way* better. That's why I've been worried about these
negatives that I think are not perfect for alt process, and maybe their
true destiny is to be silver negatives. However, it's probably possible to
be overly obsessive-compulsive about this.
--shannon