The American Heritage Center offers internships for University of Wyoming students in various areas. One example is the opportunity to work with Grace Derby, the Center’s Photography Lab Supervisor. Students learn procedures for preserving historic photographic materials. Here, Gabby Castro shares her experience in the lab.
During my internship at the American Heritage Center photography lab, I spent the semester learning how to digitize different types of photographic negatives. My goal was to understand how different tools affect the final image, and which methods work best for fragile historical negatives. I found the process fun and rewarding, like solving a visual puzzle where every detail matters.
I worked with three systems: An Epson V800 flatbed scanner, a Fujifilm digital camera, and a large-format Linhof Kardan E 4×5 camera with a Better Light Super 8K-HS digital scanning back, which is a specialized high resolution scanner.
To compare them, I digitized 8×10 sheet film negatives and 5×7 wet plate glass negatives from the Clark H. Getts and Osa Johnson Papers. Osa Johnson, along with her first husband Martin Johnson, was an early 20th-century explorer and filmmaker whose work documented wildlife and Indigenous communities in Africa. These negatives are fragile, full of detail, and historically important, perfect for understanding what each digitization method can (and can’t) do.
The wet plate negatives are heavy glass objects with uneven emulsion (the light-sensitive coating on a negative) and distinctive surface marks that are important to preserve. The 8×10 sheet film negatives are fragile, reflective, and difficult to keep flat.
When I started, I had to restore the large-format camera and digital scanning back, which hadn’t been used for a long time. Fortunately, the manuals were available, but the information online on how to use the software was very limited, so I had to experiment with cables, software, lighting, and the Better Light scanning back until everything finally worked. It took time, but once the system was operational, I didn’t have any further problems during the scanning process.
Once everything was ready, I began digitizing with all three systems.
The digital camera was much faster. Each 8×10 negative was photographed in four parts, and each wet plate negative in nine to achieve better quality and greater detail in each image. Taking the photographs went quickly but merging them in Photoshop took time: around 15 minutes for each film negative and about 25 minutes for each wet plate. The results were clean and high contrast, but the camera struggled with capturing the more subtle details in the glass plates.
The large-format camera with the Better Light scanning back produced an interesting quality. This system scans the image line by line, which means it’s slower, but the details and tonal smoothness are impressive. Tonal smoothness refers to the gradual transitions between light and dark areas. For both film and wet plates, I divided each negative into four sections. Each section took around 6 minutes to scan, so the whole negative took about 24 minutes, plus around 18 minutes to merge the final image. Even though the workflow was slower than the digital camera, the results were sharper, more consistent, and more faithful to the original materials.
Using the Epson V800 scanner, I had to scan each 8×10 sheet film negative in two separate sections and then merge them in Photoshop. Each scan took about 20 minutes, and merging the pieces took another 25 minutes. The 5×7 wet plate negatives were faster because of their size. I scanned in a single pass, and each plate took about 20 minutes. While the scanner produced high-resolution files, it struggled with large-sized negatives, transparency, and the fragility of these materials.
After comparing the outcomes, the differences were clear. The scanner was easier but introduced reflections and softness, especially with the glass plates. The digital camera was the fastest, but it lost subtle detail and struggled with transparency. The large-format system with a digital scanning back took the longest to set up, but once it was working, it consistently produced the most accurate and detailed images. It was also the only method that preserved the physical character of the negatives without many modifications, including the edges and emulsion visual variations of the wet plates.
This project taught me that there isn’t one perfect digitization method for large-format negatives. Each tool has its strengths. The large-format camera is ideal for high detail images. The digital camera is great for quick access copies or large batches, it also allows printing on a large scale. And the flatbed scanner works well for smaller materials that fit comfortably on the scanner glass.
Additionally, this internship helped me understand the technical and creative decisions behind digitization and how those choices impact the way these materials are preserved and shared. It also helped me grow as a photographer, pushing me to notice details I never would have thought about before. Working with these materials made me appreciate the care needed to protect them.