Photography Phriday, preserving your photos
Hi there, it’s Sharon (aka skyezak) here with today’s photography tip.
I thought I’d give you a quick look at how some of my not-so-good photos have changed over the years (yes, these are seriously not the best photos when some of them were taken by me in my childhood with the crummiest camera out)! But you can see that this assortment I’ve picked out are all off-colour – some have a pink tint, a yellow and even a green tint to them. It seems that during the 70′s, the photo processing techniques were not very photo-friendly and thus the photos have slowly changed colour over the years. If you have your photos stored in light or in harmful photo albums such as those ones that are sticky where you lift the clear protector up to pop your photo down, then you may also be contributing to the deterioration of your precious memories. I was first introduced to paper scrapbooking about 6 years ago through an at-home workshop and although I didn’t think much of sticking your photos onto white pages with a minimal amount of embellishments, I did take onboard the knowledge I learnt about preserving your photos. I didn’t realise that the acid found in many of those sticky albums can deteriorate your photos so that in many years to come, they will be gone — forever! If you have any photos stored in non acid-free/non photo-safe albums, it is best to get them out as soon as you can. Make sure you store your loose photos in a dark and damp-free spot too. For these photos where the colour is ruining the image, I’d scan them sooner rather than later to stop the photo deteriorating beyond salvaging. At least you can scan the image and edit in your photo-editing program rather than wait until the image disappears beyond recognition. Non-scrappers probably wouldn’t think twice about this, but after seeing how many of my old photos have ended up, it’s best to take this message onboard if you want to have these memories around for your children and their families to remember you by.
The background paper on the image above is from the May ScrapMatters newsletter kit, so it’s a little sneak peak for you!
