1993 Evergreen Asia Trip

I've made a resolution to get most of my Black/White film scanned this year. I estimate that it should take me roughly 6 months at 10 images a day to get the majority of the film that I want archived scanned and burnt to DVD. What I'm finding difficult is either the condition of the original negative - if it is negative I've printed a few times, the condition is worse - but even some of the negatives I may have printed one image of are not in the best shape. The best thing is, most of the images I've never printed. I tend to keep shooting - breaking one of the cardinal sins of photography; no darkroom time. Back in the day, developing a roll of film was at least an hour unless you had access to a dedicated lab, but that usually only helped for Color as most labs need to keep the B/W chemicals much fresher / there were less automated B/W machines out there. The silver lining in my cloud of laziness with printing is that many of the images I'm scanning 17 years later I've never seen in detail, only in a contact sheet. I forget that each click of the shutter during this trip of a frame of film that needed to be preserved, carried, protected from the elements, etc...Now I'm reaping some of the benefit of both keeping a protective lid on all these images for so long, as well as my obvious dedication to preserving the film in an archival manner.

This image in particular sums up what I've been finding during the first few days of scanning. The images I didn't print are some of my better ones so far. This monkey in particular is interesting because a similar print of it in a more austere pose was the image I've printed before - this image I never gave a second look but in many ways is more powerful and interesting the one I previously had enjoyed.