This may interest someone. One of my favorite movies is The Odd Couple with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. One day in the early seventies, I was in a movie memorabilia shop in Hollywood browsing through several boxes of miscellaneous, unsorted old stills which they sold for something like a quarter apiece. Two of three of the boxes, as it turned out, contained not stills but proof sheets — and maybe in this day and age, I need to explain what those are.
When someone shoots 35mm negative film — which some photographers, amazingly, still do but which once was the norm — they usually have them processed and then turned into proof sheets, which are tiny prints (about an inch by an inch and a quarter) of the negatives. They're too small to use for much of anything except to figure out which shots are good enough to turn into…or at least, they used to be close to useless.
In the boxes that day, I found about twenty proof sheets from stills that were shot on the set of The Odd Couple. I didn't find the stills, themselves and they wouldn't have been in the quarter box, anyway. But I found all these proof sheets and they were of so little value that the storeowner gave them all to me for two bucks. I stuck them in a file folder and forgot about them.
This afternoon, I came across them and on a whim, had my assistant scan them at 1200 dpi, just to see how well they'd enlarge. Pretty well, it turns out. Modern technology makes it possible to get some pretty sharp images off these teensy photographs. Here's a low rez detail of the above frame…
I don't have anything in mind for them but suddenly, I have a whole mess of Odd Couple images I didn't have before. Also, somewhere in this house, there's a crate with other proof sheets. Some are ones I bought like the Odd Couple proofs but some are from my own work with a camera. I lost some negatives of photos I shot in the seventies, as well as the photos, themselves…but I may still have the proof sheets. That would sure be interesting. In the meantime, I just thought I'd mention this here because it may make someone think, "Hey, I've got old proof sheets squirreled away here. Maybe there are some images on them that can be scanned and put to some use."