When the photographic process was discovered, the first step toward anyone and/or everyone having a camera was taken. By around 1910 or so, cameras were widely available and photography began to sweep the United States and eventually the world.

Cameras have come in all sizes..including the film. Tintypes, 4x5 roll film for press cameras, glass plates that can produce large direct prints, 127 Brownies that did so much for Kodak and...drum roll, please...the nearly ubiqutous 35mm camera, both rangefinder and Single Lens Reflex.

Whatever format you chose to use, photographs were taken by the billions. But along with the photographs came a problem. What to do with all the pictures that were being taken. The solutions to that problem ranged all over the landscape and most of them did absolutely nothing for the health of the photographs, never mind the negatives.

An example of what time, neglect and/or abuse can do to a photograph is seen is this tintype of my Grandfather, Alfred Andrew Wacaster. Taken about 1884 or 1885, Alfred would have been about 17 years old at the time the photo was taken. Frankly, it's astounding that it's still in as good a condition as it is, having been tossed around, abused and neglected for over 120 years.

Note that I am not discussing digital images. Not only is that a whole different animal, it's also changing at warp speed. This discussion focuses on conventional negatives, slides and prints.

That said, when we got our pictures back from the processor, most of the time we pulled out the prints and left the film strips in the package. Quite often, the negatives were not even cut, being returned to you rolled up and dropped back into the plastic cartridge the film came packed in. So what did we do with the negatives? They usually laid around for awhile, then eventually wound up being tossed in a drawer or a shoebox. Over the years, heat, humidity and the occasional bug began to affect the negs and, when you finally dug out the negatives to have another print made, you found them damaged. Sometimes slightly, sometimes unusably so.

The rolled negatives present a different and in some ways worse problem. It takes only a brief period of time for the curl to become permanent. After 20 or 30 years or more, they occasionally become brittle to the point that they will actually crack or split if you try to unroll them. Even if they remain flexible, it takes extra effort to make new prints.

As for the prints, they took a similar beating. Additionally, laying out in the light, they began to fade as well. Physically, they wound up being bent, crumpled or torn. If you did make an effort to protect them, you either stuck'em in a photo album by literally gluing them to the pages or used some of those newer 'magnetic' photo album pages. The 'magnetic' pages, of course, are one of the worst things you can do to a photo. Granted, they're protected by a clear plastic sheet, but you'll find that it doesn't take more than a couple or three years before you won't be able to remove the photos from the pages without damaging them. And the longer you leave them, the worse it gets.