Well, it's been a while since I last presented a contraption. Since fall is in the air, I thought I'd present you with a work in progress.
This idea came from an annoyance. I have a ton of pictures that were taken before labs offered index prints. While I have some sort of identification for them, it is rather vague and searching through boxes of prints just to find one is annoying. While scanning all of them would be a solution, it is a real pain in the neck to do. It is slow and time consuming even at low resolution. So, I though about photographing them instead. Fast, simple and you get a pre-digested jpeg right away that's good enough for indexing and web use. This is something that has been done before using a repro bench. But I had a few issues with the already existent material. First, repro benches are big. Second, they're expensive. Third, my Canon Powershot has an off-center tripod mount which is all plastic. If I put enough torque on the tripod mount to hold it steady, it also makes some very unhealthy sounding noises... not an answer.
What I really needed was something small that allows me to take pictures of 4x6 prints, that cost nothing and folds flat. So this is what I came up with. A simple rail with a caddy to hold the camera. A board that is fixed at 90° to hold the print. But how do you hold a print vertically? I thought of using clips... but that would get in the way. Magnets... same thing. To me, the only solution was to keep the print up using vacuum. So, I use an old computer fan hooked up to an old printer's power supply to draw air through a series of holes cut in a piece of laminate flooring.
To use it, I just have to put the camera on manual focus, adjust everything, turn the fan on and simply feed the machine. I can now digitize 24 prints in record time. Quality isn't so bad either... granted it won't reach a film scanner's resolution. But I could probably get a surprisingly good 8x10 from it. Now, all that's missing is lights to get an even exposure... but will probably come at some other time
