Wilhelm Wednesday
Published April 25th, 2006 in Life in general, Wilhelm Wednesday, photography, preservation, scrapbook marketing, scrapbooking craft, teachingSome of you are here wondering what on earth a Wilhelm is. Wilhelm is actually a who and a what. When I was doing research for my website about what was safe for photos and what wasn’t as well as what archival quality and photo safe *really* meant about 10 years ago, I found Henry Wilhelm. At that time he was considered to be the ultimate source about photo safety. I was lucky enough to have access to him through the miracle of the Internet and asked him many questions. Henry Wilhelm was the guy that museums called when they wanted to know about photo preservation. Part of the reason I ended up with my own website way back then was because I wanted to know the facts, not just what one Multi-level marketing company told me they considered safe and unsafe. Wilhelm was my guy!!! (For those of you who realised that it is not Wednesday, I know it is Tuesday but I was discussing this yesterday and decided to to it a day early.)
 ”Henry Wilhelm and Carol Brower Wilhelm are the authors of the landmark 744-page book, The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs: Traditional and Digital Color Prints, Color Negatives, Slides, and Motion Pictures, published in 1993.” The thing was this book was almost impossible to find. The story I have heard repeatedly is that Wilhelm was turned down by every major publisher and in the end he had to self-publish this book. You’re are thinking, well if the book was that bad that no publisher would publish it, why would you want it? Ah, the thing is none of the publishers would publish the book because Wilhelm took on Kodak. His research showed that Kodak pictures on Kodak paper with Kodak processing were lasting only a fraction of the time that Kodak claimed while Fuji pictures (Fuji papers plus Fuji processing) were lasting over 100 years.
Today you are lucky enough to be able to access the book for free here on the Wilhelm Imaging Research website. It is a long fairly dry read and most of it doesn’t pertain to you unless you are managing a museum, however, what does pertain to us as scrapbookers is that all photos are NOT created equal!!!
Wilhelm Wednesday will not be a regular feature but I will be blogging more about this important topic. The Wilhelm Imaging Research (WIR) website has a huge collection of valuable information for scrapbookers on lab photos and on photos created with your inkjet printer at home. If you are looking for information on a printer I highly recommend that you hunt through his site and read what he has to say. In the weeks to come I will be covering some of the knowledge that Wilhelm shares that is pertinent to scrapbooking so look for a few Wilhelm Wednesdays in the future.
I’d like to get some interactivity going here on the blog. I’m curious what you think will last longest:
- Kodak processing by a professional lab
- Fuji processing
- Epson picturemate personal photo lab
- HP Photosmart
- Joe’s 1 hour photo
What I’m looking for is a guess, not for you to go to Wilhelm and figure out which will last longest, just a guess. Next Wednesday I’ll post the longevity for these methods of photo printing and list all those who got it right.
Â
****Edited to add**** the answer is Epson printers, Epson papers and Epson inks will produce the longest lasting prints at this time.
7429 Responses to “Wilhelm Wednesday”