Film Negatives

[stater]

I have a bunch of film negatives & want to know the best thing to store them in. My thought was to get a fire proof safe & put them in there. The question is do I just throw them all in a baggie or what?

Thoughts, comments, suggestions?

Thanks.

[zippizip]

Stater,

Always a good question and one I've answered often when I worked for Kodak. Luckily it's fairly simple:

Environmental conditions: generally if you are comfortable, your negatives will be too. This means not too warm or cold or humidity not too wet or dry. It's worse if the temp or humidity varies so having them in a good air conditioned room is good. It helps but is usually not practical to keep them cool (around 50 degrees). Store them in the dark as the light fades the dyes that make up the color of a negative.

You need to store them in archival storage sleeves - usually not the ones from the photo lab and definitely not the paper envelopes that the prints come back in. A good source for storage sleeves is Light Impressions.

The only other thing is kind of hard to control. You have to protect them from gases. What I mean by that is the atmosphere of the storage area has to be considered too. Often the materials we store things in outgass (give off gases) and are harmful to pictures and negatives. A perfect example is the pressboard furniture you can buy and assemble yourself from places like Wal-mart, desks from Staples, etc. (You can generally smell the glue when you open the package). So it's probably okay to store them in a fire-proof safe but you have to be careful where you put the safe. For example, sealed up in a desk draw is maybe not the best place as the closed drawer will hold in the gases.

Hope this helps - if anyone else finds this useful leave a comment and I'll post it in the blog.

[stater]

Oh so much info Stan... I knew I could count on you.

Thank ya, thank ya, thank ya!