You might have expected us to be ready with an update regarding a certain major event that occurred last week, and we are working on just such a post. But first, I wanted to share a set of much older photos that we’ve never posted online before; in fact, we didn’t have them in a digital format until just last year.

The pictures in question were taken on our honeymoon in Italy way back in the year 2000. We took them with a little APS film camera that we bought more or less specifically with this trip in mind, and until last year, the only copies we had were in a gorgeous album that Julie put together using the prints and a few souvenirs from the trip. We still had the original APS negatives, however, and as photographic technology advanced, it bothered me a bit that we didn’t have backups in a more durable digital form. That unease, coupled with a gradually dawning awareness of the fact that the APS format was disappearing from the planet, finally motivated me to do something last December, before we ran out of options.

We didn’t have the time to scan the prints ourselves, and I was a little concerned that taking that approach wouldn’t yield the level of quality I was hoping for anyway. Instead, I shopped around for a service that could scan the negatives directly and give us high-resolution, good quality JPEG files. Some online research turned up a couple different firms that offer mail order processing: you send them your negatives, and they scan them and post the digital copies online for you to download. These services give you very high-resolution scans at reasonably affordable prices, but they require you to send your precious negatives—by far the best representation you have of your photos—by mail to faraway places like India, and in many cases, they don’t send them back. Seeing as Julie and I aren’t in any position to take a make-up trip to Italy to recreate these photos, that made me a little uncomfortable.

With that in mind, I looked around for a local solution that might give us a bit more peace of mind. It turns out that there’s a photo processing business less than a third of a mile from us, just a five-minute walk from our house, that is very well-reviewed online. It seemed like a perfect solution to our problem, but when I called to ask about the job, the owner informed me that he did not have the equipment required to handle APS negatives—see the comment above about running out of options as the format disappears from the planet. Luckily, he was able to recommend someone else in town who is still set up to handle this kind of work.

The scans we ended up getting are much lower resolution than the online services provide: the lab would have charged us significantly more for high-res scans, as the owner of the shop would have to do them by hand, and he convinced me there wouldn’t be a significant benefit in terms of quality for the uses I had in mind. He was probably right, too, as many of the original photos weren’t that great to begin with. Lots of them were shot using ISO 400 film, even though they were taken outdoors in bright light: we were taking a lot of low-light shots inside churches and museums, so changing film all the time didn’t seem to make sense, and I didn’t fully understand how much more grainy this would make the resulting photos look. He ended up having to process some of the rolls by hand anyway, due to the condition of the film, and he didn’t charge us extra.

In the end, I was moderately happy with the results. Most of the scans look decent, but many of the photos came through the scanning process looking somewhat overexposed, so I had to work with them one at a time in iPhoto to bring out highlights. It’s not clear whether this was related to the state of the negatives themselves or to the challenge of quickly scanning a couple hundred photos without knowing exactly what they looked like to begin with, but we got the negatives back, so we can always send them off someplace else if we decide we want higher-quality scans at a later date. In any event, after a bit of tuning, the final results are perfectly acceptable for posting on the web.

As an aside, I’m taking the time to wrap up this project now because we’re putting many of our old photos—including the ones from Italy that Julie didn’t use in her scrapbook—into storage since we turned the office, where they had been kept, into Joe’s bedroom. Rather than dig them out later (or not, as would have probably been the case), it made sense to get the information we needed from the pictures, like the date and time they were taken, while they were still handy. Now that the project is complete, we can put aside the box of photos that’s been sitting out ever since Joe changed rooms and free up some space on our bedroom floor.

Gallery: Honeymoon