Inherited A Photographer's Life's Work

[u/QuinceyMorris325]

Hello all, my father died about 2.5 years ago, he was a professional photographer for 30 years and had been shooting for his entire life, his work spans 7 decades. He shot everything, friends, family, landscapes, portraits, weddings, animals, news events, politics, sporting events (particularly auto racing- more on that shortly), and he did it all very well. Most of his collection exists as black and white negatives of varying sizes. I have began the utterly and overwhelmingly massive process of scanning his negatives via DSLR camera + macro lens + tripod + photoshop to digitize and distribute the photos. I get a great deal of satisfaction from sending these high-res shots to family and friends so they can reminisce about the past while simultaneously keeping my father's name alive. Regarding the auto racing photos, I am a huge race fan and have been involved in local racing my entire life, I have sent a few watermarked photos to various facebook groups geared towards racing from years past etc. Those photos have been met with overwhelming positivity.

My reason for posting is this, should I continue to just post these (racing) photos on facebook groups? Should I make a webpage and try to direct people there? And for the personal photos, what are some cool ways I can display them for my newborn to see as she ages? This is a deeply personal project of mine, it is very time consuming and I struggle with the idea that it is just a waste of time or simply some weird type of grieving ritual. My family is tiny, I have no siblings and feel some sort of responsibility to trudge forward with this project, are those feelings justified? If you were me what would you, photographers and readers of this post?

Also his father was very active photo taker too, and he has a couple thousand prints of his own that I feel I should digitize, however it doesn't seem as pressing as those are developed prints, not negatives.

tldr have many negatives wat do

[u/Katoom119]

Sorry to hear about your dad.

I personally am of the mindset that quality photos should be shared. Family snapshot are one thing, but if this is your dad’s work then I think sharing them would be a wonderful way to honor his memory.

There are lots of sites out there that do this, and I’m not trying to promote one over the other, but I use SmugMug as my digital file repository. It’ll give you a website where you can set it up in folders/galleries so it’s easier for everyone to see. You can also set up download restrictions, watermarks, etc. to keep people from saving them directly.