THIS IS THE PROJECT WE ARE WORKING ON
OLD FAMILY PHOTOS
I have a lot of negatives and photos that I've saved for years.
Most are colored 35 mm negatives but some are 126 and 110.
Those last two are practically impossible to get even printed up.
I also have a bunch of black and white negatives.
These are in bad shape as most are almost fifty years old and some are even older.
Black and white negatives have "crystals" of silver on them. Its nothing you can see with the naked eye and its not even in the form of silver from what I can understand. Our Dad used to work for Ames Chemical Company in Glens Falls. What they did there was to reclaim the silver through a chemical process. I remember him coming home from work with burns on his hands and arms. Just small ones, nothing major. It was because somewhere during his time there he came in contact with silver nitrate.
I remember he told us that even his mop water was recycled to make sure they got all the silver out of it. He worked as both a night watchman and as a custodial worker. They call that a custodial engineer but it has nothing to do with engineering. It has to do with sweeping, mopping and emptying waste cans.
To get back to the negatives, no store will print them up for you anymore. Its because developing and printing of black and white uses one process while developing and printing color uses another with a whole different set of chemicals. Most places cannot afford to do both and color is what the majority of photographers use today.