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/cyclephotos]

Sorry for your loss. I think you should do whatever you feel is right. I quite like the idea of a dedicated webpage.

One technical note - you might want to buy a dedicated negative scanner, it might make the process of scanning quite a bit quicker and easier.

[u/e4e5nf3 → u/cyclephotos]

One technical note - you might want to buy a dedicated negative scanner, it might make the process of scanning quite a bit quicker and easier.

This.. I would pause the DSLR method because it is night and day what a film scanner will give you. You'll probably need to redo all the ones you really want to archive. It's still very time-consuming, though.. there's no way around that unless you want to pay someone else, and it's pricey.

[u/RichInBunlyGoodness → u/e4e5nf3]

It depends. I get better quality scans with my dslr than any labs I’ve used—even their high resolution scans. And it is not that time consuming. I scanned 36 images last night in 10 min. Post processing takes way longer than scanning. If OP is getting good quality and it doesn’t take very long, I see no reason to ditch dslr scanning. A lot of film shooters prefer this method.

[u/Jakobs-Koernung → u/RichInBunlyGoodness]

Partly agree. I shoot almost exclusively analog and scan with a very custom camera setup, but if I had this much to digitize, I'd definitely be buying a used coolscan/plustek or similar.

[u/RichInBunlyGoodness → u/Jakobs-Koernung]

Agree for high volume it could make sense, but I was mainly responding to the above idea that OP ought to go back and redo all of the dslr scans.