Like most families, mine has accumulated thousands of images dating well into the last century.

As a child, I would page through our families photo albums for hours.  I loved seeing photographs of my parents that my grandparents had printed in their darkrooms decades earlier.  I would marvel at prints of my sister and me only a handful of years earlier, but taken before we were able to form memories.  It was a marvelous experience.

As I would pour over old photos, I wondered how they would look if I could see them in a larger format.  Thoughts of my mom and I dropping off sleeved strips of 35mm negatives for reprints and enlargements for the occasional framed gift to a grandparent or relative, along with the seemingly constant reminder from my dad to, "keep your fingers off the negatives!" instilled in my brain early on that the negatives, not so much the prints, were the key to a photograph's information.

Fast forward a few decades.  Sadly, my grandparents and their darkrooms are gone and my family's photo albums are several states away, but the negatives and slides that produced the prints in the albums are still here, safe with me.  In 2011, I began digitizing my family's film negatives and slides so that they could be viewed and appreciated by everyone in my family.  As I worked on that project, friends and neighbors got excited after seeing the results and began to ask me to digitize their families' negative and slide collections.  As I digitized more and more of my friends and families' film negatives and slides, I developed processes and equipment that increased the quality of the digitizations and made my workflow more efficient, all the while gaining immense satisfaction from seeing the reactions of people who were seeing what their parents, grandparents, even great grandparents had photographed so many years earlier.  

It is immensely important for all of us to preserve our pasts.  We can learn so much about our own lives through our relatives.  The Film Preservation Project helps you do just that by transforming photographic film negatives and slides into digital files that you can print, share, search, and save.  We truly look forward to helping you preserve your past!