Some pictures are more important than others. Some pictures have to be saved in order to do their job.

Ths was the case with this photo of my grandmother. She is really uncomfortable in front of the camera, so when I had managed to capture a frame where she is too happy to notice the camera, it had to be good. Then, I poured fix over the film before developer. Bad idea indeed, and I didn’t know fix was depleting developer when I swapped them around without washing. When my three films came out, hardly developed, I thought the picture might be lost. Darkroom printing was out of the question, my skills doesn’t stretch that far. Digital scann I could do, but the negative was really thin, so it took a lot of trial and error.

The scann turned out really good, but far too dusty to be useable. I don’t have ICE-capabilities, so I settled in for a long haul of spot-cleaning. The screenshot above shows the result after a third of the picture was cleaned.

Here are all the spots marked after well over an hour solid work.

The result! Probably the only good photo of my grandmother at this age and time. It was well worth the effort.