Over forty years ago, a young Danish newspaper photographer named Bent Rej was assigned to photograph a young British pop band’s Scandinavian leg of a European tour. The band was the Rolling Stones and Rej encountered the band just as they were experiencing the first rewards of their newfound success. Rej was befriended by the band, especially Brian Jones, and over the next year, between 1965 and 1966, was given unprecedented access to the band as they toured supporting their album Out of Our Heads, which included their hit "Satisfaction". Rej took shot after shot of the very young and very hot band just as they (in Bassist Bill Wyman’s words), were becoming able to buy good houses, great cars, and eat in places that their fans couldn't afford to.

Fast forward a few decades. Rej, still a photographer and still in Denmark, sets out to bring all his old photos into the digital domian. In the process he rediscovered the almost forgotten old shots of the young Rolling Stones.

“I decided that I needed to begin scanning my vast film archives,” he explains, “and is was these efforts that led to what eventually would became my book ‘Rolling Stones - In the beginning’, which was published in 2006.”

Rej's best-selling book is filled with both candid and staged photos and accompanied by captions from both Rej and the Rolling Stones themselves. The result is a warm and historic time capsule of one of the world's greatest bands at a critical moment in their lives and careers. Scanning his old archive turned out to be a large career move for Rej as well.

“The book has evolved into a range of other projects, such as gallery exhibitions, websites, and so on. And all thanks to the fact that I was interested in being able to display and process my photographs in new, non-traditional ways.”

Wherever your images start – on whatever media they’re stored – you need a scanner that can guarantee that all the quality of the original image is kept intact and a scanner that will ensure that you don’t have to stop taking new shots to make time for scanning old ones.

Follow the links on this page to find out more about how the Hasselblad X1 and X5 scanners can help you find the photographic gold in your archive.