TIL I was destroying my negatives by storing them in binder sheets for 5 years

So last week I was sorting through my old negatives from 2018 and noticed this weird haze on a bunch of shots from a trip to Portland. I thought my development technique was just getting rusty or something. Took them to the local camera shop and the old guy there looked at my binder and goes "you've been stacking them backwards in PVC pockets, they're off-gassing and fogging up." Apparently those cheap 3-ring binder pages trap moisture and the plastic coating reacts over time. Now I keep everything in those Print File polypropylene sleeves that cost like $15 for a pack of 50. Has anyone else wrecked a whole batch of negatives from bad storage?

2 comments

2 Comments

david82126d ago

you've been stacking them backwards in PVC pockets" - man, I don't know. Feels like one of those things that sounds super scary but is probably overblown. I've got negatives from high school in those same cheap Target binder pages and they look fine after like 15 years. Maybe your Portland trip had humidity issues or something, and the binder sleeves just got blamed. Unless you're living in a sauna or storing them in direct sunlight, I doubt a few plastic pockets are ruining film that fast.

shane_ross23d ago

Buddy of mine stored his grandpa's old 35mm rolls in those PVC pages for like 20 years in a closet, and when he finally pulled them out, the emulsion was actually sticky and left goo on the plastic. That was enough to scare me straight.