Old slides

I am giving a lecture tomorrow about the archaeology of a small bit of Hertfordshire landscape. I have borrowed a huge selection of slides from the ex-Director of the Society. Quite fun going through them and scanning what I need.

What has distressed me is that some of the slides have developed mould. Yuck! Interestingly, only Agfachrome slides seem to be suffering from this problem. If you used Agfachrome in the past, be warned!

K.

I've seen it on Kodachrome too, so I suspect it has more to do with storage than brand. My Dad has slides dating from 1978 through to the 1990s covering his postgrad student days through into the best part of twenty years of family holidays, unfortunately when I went through them recently looking for anything worth scanning I found mould on quite a few of the oldest. I was able to remove most of the marks with cotton buds and computer monitor cleaner but it was impossible to get right into the corners and I was worried about doing more harm than good if I rubbed any harder.

The ones of the immediate aftermath of dropping his K2 down Pen y Fan are still ok, as is the camera (will be taking it out for some exercise this summer)!

I don't doubt that other makes of slides are vulnerable too, but in this particular box of c. 1000 slides or so, the only ones so far with really bad fungus are the Agfachrome ones. They are by no means the oldest ones in the box. Quite a mixture of films used including Kodachrome, Boots, Agfachrome and some no-name ones. Thankfully, the PEC-12 cleaner and PEC-pads I have seem to get rid of the worst of it. You can still see marks on the surface but they don't appear too badly on the scans.

K.