Every Beaford Old Archive negative bag has its associated contact sheet and these also needed to be copied into a digital form, a Tiff file for this project. A flatbed scanner was the obvious choice for making these copies and a volunteer was assigned to do the work. However, the process was taking a considerable amount of time, each single contact sheet taking a couple of minutes to scan plus the scanning of the index sheet that went with it. As an alternative, I set up the copy-stand and flash lighting, that I would later use to make photographic digital copies of ‘new’ images for the Lost Decades, and this proved to be an extremely quick way of digitising them. What you can’t see from the above photograph is the polarising sheets on the front of the two flash softboxes and the polarising filter on the front of my camera lens. The lens filter is set at 90 degrees to those on the softboxes. This double polarising prevents light reflecting off the contact sheets thus removing unwanted highlights.

As well as the contact sheets from the Old Archive folders, I came across another folder full of miscellaneous contact sheets, many of which were of Old Archive images. Some of these may well prove to be copies of those in the folders that I previously copied but, just in case they prove otherwise, I copied them as well. Both the contact sheets and information sheets were renamed.