Amongst all the memorabilia which has come down to me from my grandfather Max Enke and my mother Ruth Enke are hundreds of photographs and negatives. Not all the negatives are accompanied by prints – indeed one envelope is filled with about 70 negatives which have come back from Tom Bertram’s Drugstore in Ladysmith, obviously having accompanied their prints, but the latter are nowhere to be found.

I want prints of the negatives. I have an Epson scanner with plastic holders for negative film but no holders for negatives sized like the one I have. The reason turns out to be that the film type, 116 or 616, measuring 70 mm wide, is too old to have holders in any dedicated scanner I can find – they only handle 110 films which succeeded type 116. Any on-line places I found which would print from negatives also did not go back as far as type 116.

So what to do? Some searching of the web churned up a number of sites supporting photographers who are reverting to film, including one talking about copying the negatives. Although it wasn’t exactly what I wanted, it did provide the “light bulb” moment because he was using his camera to do the copying. He had his camera suspended from his tripod. That’s when I realized I had a travel tripod with a head designed to hold my iPhone! A little experimentation showed I could shoot down with it to take a photo of a negative.

But the negative had to be backlit by a light table. Second “light bulb” moment – I could use my iPad, displaying a solid white image on the screen to be my light table. A little fiddling around and, lo and behold. I could get the correct image from the negative.

Then it was just a matter of taking the image into Photoshop, Inverting the image to give the positive and using various editing tricks on the result to produce my final snapshot.

This is me learning to crawl, helped by my grandmother Marion Lejeune Enke. The negative is almost exactly 83 years old!

And here are some more photos I have reproduced from the negatives.

There are many, many more.