When Edward Marshall found damaged negatives a quarter of a century ago he had no idea what would come out of them.

But after teaming up with photographer Theresa Airey, years of dedicated research by the pair have born fruit in book form. 'Bermuda The Quiet Years' will be on sale in the shops tomorrow.

The book takes a slow and quiet walk through an Island that we rarely see today. Some of the images feature landmarks that no longer exist ? such as the Bermudiana and Hamilton Hotels ? while others feature homes that still look the same as they did 60 years ago.

The book also features portraits the first and second Parliamentarians of African decent and the Island's Talbot Brothers. And imagine Ordinance Island without the bridge.

Mr. Marshall said he stumbled upon thousands of negatives when he purchased the Bermuda Photocraftsmen photography and film developing company in 1977 from Bunny Conyers.

"I found thousands of negatives on Bermuda," he said, "And upon sorting through them I discovered what a treasure I had.

"I wasn't really thinking of doing a book at all, what I was trying to do was to find a way of restoring the negatives as a way of putting them on display.

"I happened to mention to Theresa about the situation we were in and she said, 'let me have a look'. She was so moved with the negatives and thought she could work with these.

"She has did an incredible job of cleaning them up, as they were stored in boxes for years and years and years. We selected about 147 of them and I still have thousands more of family photos and portraits of several of our statesmen today when they were little kids.

"We got the photographs of scenes which Theresa thought would be great in a book so she really has done an incredible amount of work."

Mrs. Airey said over the past two years her work was tedious, but she loved investigating where and possibly when the photographs were taken.

"If it hadn't been for the computer era, it wouldn't have happened," Mrs. Airey said, "Because you cannot print from those negatives because of the humidity, the mould and the cracks and I am a good photographer in the darkroom. So some took about four hours to restore and a few took 18 to 20 hours.

"It was just using Adobe Photoshop's cloning tool and I tried not to add anything or take anything away.

"They are historical and I didn't want to mess them up in that regard. When you finish you have a very sharp image ? very clean. Some still have a little of the mould on them that I just couldn't get out."

Mrs. Airey said she went to the Archives to research who took the photographs.

"We figured that Conyers had taken most of them and from looking at Annie Lusher's style of works in the archives there are portraits that we have in the book that we think are hers," she said.

"We give a little salute to the photographers that we think took them. Of course they are all dead and the photographs were taken between 1883 and 1950 so the last bits were Queen Elizabeth coming over for her Coronation tour, which I thought put a nice end to the book."

The title 'Bermuda The Quiet Years' came about because the motor vehicle law was in force until 1946 when the law was revoked.

"And then all the engines came in, but up until that time there were just carriages, bicycles and people that walked," she said. Mr. Marshall said the photographs depict that era.

Mrs. Airey said she came upon a very rare photograph of Parliament in session.

"I found another one in a book in the Archives, which was four inches by five maybe and it said 'a rare photograph taken of Parliament in Session 1883 May' by Annie Lusher," she said.

"I looked at it, but at the time the negatives were new to me, so I wasn't sure, but when I went back to the house I realised that it was the same negative. "So as I was restoring it I came across a black man's face and I thought a black man in 1883 in Parliament was unusual. Then I found another man, so I did some research and at times I felt like a little sleuth, and I found out that W.H.T. Joell was the first black man inducted into Parliament in May.

"I thought that this was him and I went over to Sessions House and they knew who he was, but they didn't have any pictures of him, so I went to the library and I asked to see some pictures of Joell and it wasn't him, but I found the other man John Henry Thomas Jackson. So I thought well I got him, but where is Joell? "So I found his descendant, who is Joyce Hayden and she came over with her family tree, and I showed her this picture blown up and she said, 'he is right there'.

"So I told her he really didn't look like a black man and she she said he wasn't and that he was from Afghanistan. And I went - oh.

"Now do you know who that man is and she said Jackson. I called numerous people and no one could figure out why he was in that picture at that time because he didn't come into power until Joell died. But the man is Alex Scott's great-great-grandfather.

"That was an incredible find and a very precious thing to find. It is exciting to be able to save history."

The rest are history of course and they show places as they used to be, she said.

"This is the Lemon Tree Cafe, where Gibbons used to be and this is the Bookstore and the Island Shop," said Ms Airey.

"They are still there, but different. This picture of the Cathedral is when it didn't have a tower yet and it wasn't until 1905 when they finished it."

There are pictures of the old trains, which ran up Par-la-Ville Road and detailed photos of the old Bermudiana Hotel. There are also kegs of rum or whisky which were stored in Triminghams in the warehouse and then later returned to the States. She also found pictures in the Maritime Museum that they had the negatives of.

"We decided to do them in the sepia tones because it is prevalent of that era," said Mr. Marshall.

"Even that has its own distinction. If it goes yellow you get that sepia gold tone, which we were trying to avoid because it makes it look as if you are trying to make them look old," said Mrs. Airey.

Mr. Bunny Conyers had been a photographer with Rutherford and no one knows how many others and was the last survivor of that era.

"He had all these negatives that he had collected over the years in the warehouse," Mr. Marshall said.

"It was a big filing cabinet and he said, 'everything goes with it'. He was very much up in age and he just wanted to relax.

"So I sold the business in 1996, but I had all the negatives at home and I had been sorting them out and trying to steam them and get them unglued from each other and then with the idea that at some time if something came along we could use them.

"When I found that Theresa was very much qualified I approached her with the project."

When she was at the Museum looking at their nautical pictures, she saw one that was all faded, but they did not have the negative.

She said: "So this way at least they are in a book and they are preserved. The book was printed by Butler and Tanner in Somerset, England, who do good printing, and we paid a lot to have it printed.

"It looks good and it is going to last - it's not cheap," Mrs. Airey said, "The books published by The Royal Gazette 'Our Island Our People' gave us the idea of the waterproof jacket. "When we put two images on it there are only two ways of looking at a book and when it is face down and there is nothing on the back, but to have something interesting on the back then people will still want to look at it and turn it around.

"The covers are getting to be pass?, because when they get damaged you just have a plain book. You don't lose the quality of the book."

They prepared a mock up of the photographs and began showing them to people to help piece together the past.

"It was so funny and finding some of these was like happenstance," said Mrs. Airey. "We had a mock-up which we took around and showed to everybody.

"We asked, 'do you know anything about this? And Fay Horton-Bush was here for lunch one day and she said, 'that's my house ? that's my grandmother's house'. So we drove over and everything was exactly the same ? the wall is there ? the sign was there.

"And when her father and mother came to pick her up, they breezed through the mock up. He is a Wilkinson and had owned the lumber company on Front Street and he said the ship in the photo had bought the lumber from Canada.

"So I blew it up and looked at it on the screen and I was able to see all these little planks of wood on the ship. It came in odd ways and we thank all these people. And that is how you really find out what was going on ? from the old-timers and other people."

There was also an old photograph of the now-defunct Hitching Post.

Mr. Marshall said: "They had a nice little soda fountain there and Goose Gosling used to take all us junior guys there after we played soccer in Sandys and we would all stop there and have ice cream and milk shakes on our way home.

"It was quite an ordeal going all the way to Somerset in those days."

There was also a picture of an old BOAC plane, now known as British Airways. He said: "Bring Over American Cash ? that's what we used to say when we worked for Tourism, which was called the Bermuda Trade and Development Board back in those days when I worked as a photographer.

Mrs. Airey, who is now a wiz with digital photography, resisted the change for many years.

"I never thought that I would go digital and I had written two books on photography and it was really tough for me to go over," she said.

"But all of my friends kept showing me what they were doing on the computer, so it was funny because I was teaching traditional photography at the Marilyn Institute of Art, and I didn't want the kids to know that I was taking digital at night.

"So that's where I started and once I got into it that was it."

She said he skills paid off before this book when she did another on a golf architect.

"You have to wait because you can't have people in a golf shot, so the sun would be great and there would be a threesome or a fivesome and then as soon as they would leave, I would only have a few seconds before another team would arrive," she said.

"Once in Florida, I remember having to wait five hours to take one shot. Then at the end of this (golfing) book I was doing a lot of digital and like, there were two people on this fairway and I went home and I cloned them out with Photoshop. It is so much easier to do.

"It changed a lot in the ways that I was photographing, as well as the way I was printing."

She said although the work sounds easy it is quite tedious. "There is one picture where I had to reconstruct the water and it was the only one that I really reconstructed a lot on," she said.

"But it was just water and you can't go wrong with filling in water."

Mr. Marshall said most of the negatives were in the same condition.

"Some are better than others, but as the years went on the solutions got a little bit better and they held up a lot better," he said, "For instance the glass plates."

Mrs. Airey said she found the glass plated negatives easier to deal with because she could clean the mould off them.

"I just used water on a dampened tissue and lightly wipe over the surface," she said, "I didn't want to use any chemicals.

"They weren't as bad as the gelatine, as the the bacteria lives in the gelatine, and because of the nitrate bases they deteriorate a lot and they swell and they shrink. "All that contraction causes cracks."

Mr. Marshall said the gelatine plates become just like a piece of plastic and they snap in half.

"They are very brittle," he said. Mrs. Airey said she used a flatbed scanner to copy the negatives.

"Some I just had to slide them over and slide them in," she said, "And once they were on I'd just close the scanner. That is the only way they would have been saved."

Mr. Marshall said the entire process has been an exciting one. "Theresa has just worked so hard in doing the research and the restorations ? it would've never materialised without her expertise," he said.

The pair were sure whether they are going to have the book as a limited edition or not.

Mrs. Airey said: "It depends on the response. If they sell out by November we could do another run for Christmas."

They are also looking to do an exhibition of several of the enlarged and painted prints.

"We are running reproduced colour prints," she said, "There will be four hand-coloured and six reproductions.

"Each one has an exclusive edition of ten ? so the market wont be flooded."