Salvaging Flood Damaged Photos

These comments are base on our experiences in Dalby in 1981 when we had water up to the window sills. We always look for a house on the hill everywhere we have lived since. Thought this might be useful information for anyone helping to recover photos that have been damaged.

Our wedding album was in the bottom drawer of a fixed unit that couldn’t be lifted and was forgotten about when we put everything else up as high as we could. We concentrated on electrical things and clothing etc and forgot about books in the study including the wedding album. 

They were under water for 24hrs and wet for a lot longer before we got back into the house and got around to thinking about things like this. A fellow darkroom enthusiast (nothing digital in those days) took them to clean them up. We thought we would be able to wash them as washing in water is the final stage of the print developing process. They had been wet so long that the emulsion was starting to lift from the backing so we just spread them out to dry. We thought that we could wash them later when the emulsion layer had dried out.  No so. No matter how long we dried them any contact with water and the emulsion still starts to lift. The good news is that after drying them they are OK. I have my wedding photos 30 years on. A few mud stains and a few white patches on some where the emulsion lifted off and was washed away but otherwise ok. The colours etc are as good as new. (My hideous 70’s brown suit is still brown)

The best advise therefore for anybody trying to recover flood damaged photos is to get them dry first and foremost. Anything else can follow later. As my friend Bob did for me, the best thing you can offer is somewhere that is dry and not covered in mud to spread things out to dry. Later they can be scanned and  tools like Memory Manager from CM used to remove the blemishes etc and reprinted.

We still look at our wedding photos (occasionally) and the marks have become part of the story that we passed on to the kids. We look back on those times and recall the friends that helped us.

I thought I’d pass this on because I’m getting a bit fed up with the doom and gloom in the media. “Everything is ruined” seems to make a better story than “It takes time but lots can be salvaged” particularly photos.