Historical glass plates of Ernest Shackleton's voyage to the Antarctic are among items yet to be returned after a Dunedin processing company, Spectrum Photos, closed its doors.
"I want the plates back," Colin Rutherford said yesterday.
The Dunedin resident said the six glass negative plates were taken by his marine-engineer father, John, who was part of the explorer's 1907-09 expedition.
Mr Rutherford, who celebrates his 93rd birthday on Wednesday, said the glass plates, which were taken on his father's Graflex Reflex, were dropped off to the film processor's McNab St store more than a month ago.
Several days later, he went to pick them up and the store was closed and emptied out.
Mr Rutherford said his father did his own processing on the support vessel to Shackleton's Nimrod, and some of his other glass plates had been donated to a museum.
Eleanor Tempest, whose story was in the Saturday edition of the ODT, received her developed photographs later that day.
"I was so thrilled to get them back. I hope other people get theirs back," she said.
