Vintage Photos: how to restore old pictures quickly and cheaply

Restoring old photos can be a fun way to wait out the winter months. Read our tips to buy, re-shoot and restore glass plate negatives and give vintage photos new life.

We've all heard the horror stories of old photographers lugging heavy boxes of glass plate negatives and weighty cameras out into the remote landscape (or worse, the battlefield). Photography has become much less expensive and much more accessible since then, but ironically those early glass plates lugged by your photographic forebears now offer a fun and inexpensive way of expanding your art collection as well as your photography portfolio. For relatively little money you can go to boot sales, auctions or antique shops and buy boxes or individual glass plates which, with some patience and care, can be quite easily restored to their former glory in the digital darkroom.

'Glass plates getting harder to find than they were even just a few years ago,' Alan says. 'But you can still findthem if you go to the right places.'

Alan visits boot sales, antique shops or markets such as that in Covent Garden where merchants often sell glass plates in bulk. 'Recently I bought a couple boxes at Covent Garden, which each contained 50 glass plates,' he says. 'I spent £140 in total, but that still works out to £1.40 each, which is less than a pint of beer or even a birthday card. Other times I can often get boxes for £20. eBay is great too, where the average price for a single glass plate is about £2 to £5.'

 

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Vintage Photos: how to restore old pictures quickly and cheaply