Old photo paper often becomes hard and brittle, and I recently received a pair of 1909 panorama photos with exactly that problem. As they’d been kept tightly rolled, if I tried to unroll them I’d likely crack the paper. In this video I’ll show how I first softened the photos’ paper and restored its flexibility, then was able to safely unroll the photos. The whole process took several days, but the results are worth it.

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We’ll start with a close look at the 1934 photo that arrived yesterday from eBay, then we’ll move on to some sharp photos from 1909 that arrived a few days earlier:

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A look at five more photos I bought recently, showing Hong Kong in the 1920s.

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Hello from Wales! We're getting settled in, so I had time to record this short video looking at a batch of photos I recently bought on eBay. They came from a bunch of different albums but were all sold together - I guess they're the leftovers after the seller had sold off all the better photos.

The photos don't look special at first glance and I was the only bidder, so let's see if I've wasted my money or if any of the photos have a story to tell. (e-mail subscribers: if you can't see the video below, please click here to watch it on Youtube.)