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Home / Archive Decisions
Archive Decisions
The following information may help you understand what you are seeing in this archive—not the subjects in the photos, but the archive itself.
- Editorial Decisions
The decision was made at the beginning of this project to include everything and not make editorial decisions about what images to include. Therefore, you may see photos that you think should have been left out, such as those with obvious framing problems (thumb-over-lens, etc.) or wildly wrong exposure. This can be summarized as "there are no 'wrong' photos" since the purpose of the archive is to share the entire collection of photographs by Floyd R. Whitmore. - Scanning Decisions
To increase the odds of being able to get through all of the scanning in a somewhat reasonable time, the decision was made to use the same settings for all photos unless the "standard" settings caused an obvious problem. This means the same approximate resolution, the same dust-removal option, and the same color restoration option. For medium-format slides, the scanning process was slightly different due to the scanner not directly supporting that format. On those images, there is usually a black border from the slide mount since no automatic adjustment was made by the scanning software.
In late December (2020), it was determined that one of the settings that had been used for the first 50 sets was creating a problem in the digitized images. Details are documented on Patreon. After more testing and consideration, the choice was made to continue using that setting. It was a choice between image quality for casual browsing versus image quality for digital re-use in derivative works. It is expected that most people viewing the archive will just be casually browsing, like visiting a museum, and not using the images in digital derivative works.
However, to serve those who would like to reuse one or more images in their own creative projects, custom re-scanning is available. - Archival Material Access Decisions
Currently, the highest-resolution scan is available directly from this server. However, the infrastructure on which this site runs is fairly limited, so if the burden of providing the maximum quality scans becomes problematic, the immediate access currently offered may be replaced with another method of obtaining the largest files. - Content Organization Decisions
Because the subjects of the photos are often unknown at the time of scanning, it's not feasible to organize the content by subject matter. Therefore, to represent the collection as it was retrieved in physical form, the digital content is organized by storage box and inner container. One result of this decision is that sets of photos have widely varying numbers of images, ranging from just a few to over one hundred.
Not all of the original material was found in a container within the storage box. Some slides were simply bound by rubber bands (many of which had deteriorated due to age) and/or paper wrappers, and some items were loose (either originally or as a result of rubber bands breaking or containers opening). At times, decisions had to be made regarding what original material to include in each set without regard for how the photographer might have grouped them, due to lack of evidence about original grouping.
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