Let's hear your photo restoration horror stories

[Doug Nelson]

I get a couple of emails a month from people that have accidentally caused physical damage to photos they were restoring.

Smeared emulsions, cracked substrates, smashed glass, tears, stuck frames, my heart sinks when I hear about these.

Now it's your turn to upset me.

Share your photo destruction stories. Plus, how did you handle it? And do you have some sort of waiver or other policy to protect yourself from just this sort of things?

To be fair, I've never ruined a restored original, but I have lost wedding negatives and ruined more than one roll of film during processing. So I'm not claiming perfection myself.

[Nezbitten]

Re: Let's hear your photo restoration horror stori

Hi Doug

I work in a small office and i have some shelves above my work area that i use as in and out boxes for work that comes in and goes out. I was in the process of moving to a new desk so id moved an old monitor on top of my shredder. It was a very early old Del with a lovely swooping sloped backed stand. It was just so that the stand and swoop of the back of it lined up with the slot in my shredder which was still in active mode as i was tidying as i went.

I didn't know that the slot and stand were perfectly aligned like a funnel of death. In moving stuff around to get the new desk in, i bumped the shelves and the latest orders tumbled down off the shelf. I deflected most onto the new desk but missed one an it popped up into the air. Landed square on to the monitor slid down to the shredder and perfectly aligned itself full width into the slot! and started shredding instantly. The board it was on was thick so the shredder was struggling, I kicked the shredder over which stopped it. Fortunately it had already been restored, reprints ordered in mat and gloss in many sizes and on CD so I did not get too much of an ear bashing. The whole order was no charge. The photo only suffered minor edge damage. The shredder now lives in the kitchen!