You might think that the best quality pictures would be those that are recent. However, by far the most detailed pictures are the glass plate negatives taken around 1900 - 1930. These preserve extraordinary detail because the negatives (plates) are large and the lenses were simple. The main problem is that the long exposure time meant that  the slightest movement caused blurring. The children in these pictures often look terrified - probably because they had been promised a "spanking" if they so much as twitched!

Click to see an example of a high resolution plate

The Jeeps collection contains photos in a a range of formats:

• Paper prints (regular photos)
• 2 inch slides in glass mounts
• 35mm slides
• Unmounted colour slides
• 35mm negative strips
• 2 inch negative strips
• 120x160mm glass negatives
• 75x105mm glass negatives

All formats have been scanned (see box on the left) and are in the reference section of the web site.

The photos were all scanned using a Canon D2400U with film adaptor. The machine has high quality lenses and an optical resolution of 2400 DPI. Unfortunately it is pretty slow - taking up to 2 minutes to scan each slide.

Most slides and negatives were scanned at 2400DPI. The glass plates were scanned at 1200DPI and photo prints at 300 or 600DPI depending on the size.

We keep the master images in both TIF and JPEG form. The images displayed on the web site are processed down to 600 pixels wide to reduce the download time. Images uploaded to the photo printing service are 2000 pixels wide.