Film Photography News

Last week the National Park Service (NPS) celebrated its 100^th Anniversary, and to commemorate the event the agency has created an online portal where you can download over 100,000 historical images that tell the story of the NPS and chronicle the beginnings of the American conservation movement.

The images reside on the Open Park Network website and date back to the founding of such iconic national parks as Yosemite and Yellowstone. The amazing collection includes images from 20 parks in the NPS network, with the photographs organized into dozens of collections documenting different time periods.

All images in the interactive collection can be viewed full screen, and can be zoomed in and out. The Open Park Network has been working with Clemson University since 2009 to digitize over 200,000 images as well historically important documents and cultural objects from the diverse NPS collection.

Scanning was done at a lab in the Clemson library. In the case of particularly fragile items, the team would fly to the park where they are stored, bringing scanning equipment to digitize them onsite. At the onset some 2,000 images were scanned in 2009, but the project quickly gained momentum to 5,000 per year, then 34,000, and finally 92,000 at the height of the process in 2013.

Do yourself a favor and set aside some quality time to visit Open Parks Network. But be forewarned, once you start looking through the incredible collection it will be very difficult to stop.