Shooting Pix of Pix with Your Camera

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Shooting Pix of Pix with Your Camera Today I was asked how a person might get their old photos into the computer should they not have a photoscanner attached. Most of us do have lots of pix we acquired in the days before digital photography came along. Mentioned was the easy method of snapping a digital photo of the old photo print using your modern camera. Actually that is a pretty good way to accomplish the task. There are several problems that you will encounter. Here are some of them: (1) Focus and detail. You cannot properly focus your camera on an old photograph if your camera is shaking as you press the button to shoot your new picture. Steady your camera by use of a tripod or of a solid surface. If you have automatic lens focusing, use it. If not, then you will have to manually focus the lens on the center of the print image. (2) Lighting and reflections. If you use your camera's flash attachment your new photograph will probably have a great big light flare showing. If you light the old photograph with some kind of external lamp, you may also get flaring or, possibly, actual reflected images of the lamp showing on the shiny surface of the old photo print. So, if you use flash or extra lamp lighting you should use it indirectly - for example, point the flash at the wall of the room or its ceiling - not right at the subject photo print. (3) If the resulting digital photograph, the image you run through your computer, is not 100% focused and not detailed to your liking, you can often improve the new copy digital image by the use of one of the many easy-to-use digital photo editors. The image, above, shows a digital snapshot of an ink drawing that was hanging on the wall here. The left hand side of the image is as the old digital camera saw the picture hanging there, and the right hand side of the image is the same digital camera image after it was put through the editor, "Paint dot net" (Paint.net) Good luck and have fun with copying your old photo prints, even if you do not have a digital image scanner. * * * * * * * * * * Image source: Original drawing by Al Kaeppel, Editing and collage by Gus Kilthau * * * * * * * * * *