Funeral Band, Chinatown, NY ©Peter Bennett

Mick Jagger, East Village,, NY ©Peter Bennett

People are always asking me what to do with their old negatives. It is not an easy question to answer. Most of the scanning I do for clients is of their older prints, anywhere from twenty to a hundred years old. If the prints are in good shape, they can yield a perfectly good scan for most of the uses we would want them for.

So do you throw away all the negatives you have?

Most of the negatives I find worth keeping or scanning are photographs I took that have a bit more meaning to me than the standard family photo. Some go back to my early days with a camera, efforts to be more creative and to capture some meaningful images. Others are for prints I just don’t have anymore or of images I might want to blow up large to make a new print.

I am lucky that I do have so many older prints from my grandparents on both sides, but many people do not. I scanned a collection of old family photos taken in Oklahoma back in the 1920s and ’30s for a client who had no prints, just a collection of the negatives. The photos we brought back to life were an amazing history of not just her family but historical images of farm and prairie life Oklahoma. These were photos not seen for almost a hundred years, it was a wonderful treasure brought back to life.

Many years ago I found an old shoebox of my father’s old negatives from the 1940s. I’ve scanned many of them and discovered old photos of his travels around the country and especially my hometown of New York City. I’ve made wonderful prints of them, and quite a few of them have been published in magazines and books.

So before you throw away any old negatives, you might want to see if you have any treasures worth keeping.

Here’s more about my negative scanning services and prices.

Life in Focus - photo organizing

Your Life in Focus

Navigations of a professional photo organizer, photographer and father

Should you keep your old negatives?