Wow! Has it been over six months since I last posted? Pretty bad. An update is definitely in order…
With my early November presentation proving to be a resounding success, I was able to spec and order equipment around the first of December.  Nearly everything was delivered during the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Equipment list is thus:
- Canon EOS 5D Mark II camera body
- Canon 24-70mm zoom lens
- Canon 50mm macro lens
- Kaiser Fototechnik R1 copy stand with 5519 baseboard, 4409 column, and RTP arm
- Kaiser Fototechnik 5558 lighting unit
- Canon remote shutter release and 120V camera power supply
- Sekonic L-358 light meter
- Dell Optiplex 380 desktop with two 19†monitors
- Adobe CS5 Photoshop and Photoshop, Camera Raw, and DNG software app
- Small stuff: Gray card; Tiffen/Kodak Q13 color sep. guide; Bulb air-blower; Black velvet cloth; three 30â€x60†folding tables; rolling office chair; steel shelving unit; uncoated piece of framing glass; kitchen-type step
The setup is in a long narrow room, with the three tables arranged in a U along the walls at one end of the room. Copy stand/camera sits on the center table, computer on one side and open table for staging material on the other side. I’ve removed the bulbs from the fluorescent ceiling light fixture to avoid conflict with the daylight temp fluorescent bulbs on the copy stand. To compensate I have a small task lamp that I can use when working on the computer. The black velvet covers the copy stand base, creates a neutral background in the image, and produces a high contrast with the edges of most material, which is needed when running the Photoshop auto-crop routine.
Getting things up and running took very little time. Then, starting with settings outlined in documentation published by the Beineke Library, I spent several days shooting different types of materials under differing conditions in order to arrive at a combination of f-stop, shutter speed, and exposure compensation that produces a consistent image quality. I also worked out the post-processing routine with the Adobe apps and gathered information on final file sizes.
Once I was producing what I felt were consistent and accurate images I put together another presentation for management focused this time on gaining approval to put the process into production. I included several back-to-back comparisons showing images produced by our current scanner process with images from the same object produced by the rapid capture process. I also had examples of textual, photographic, and graphic materials of various sizes. Here’s one example of automotive product literature that I produced for the presentation: Catalog from the Electric Vehicles Company. Finally, I included preliminary numbers for master file size and production rates. This presentation well, and the process was approved for production.
I’ve now had a little over six months of experience with rapid capture, with three months of creating production images. Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with how the process works and the resulting output. I do have some lessons learned to share, which I’ll detail in my next post. In the meantime here are a couple of related writings:
– OCLC report, Rapid Capture: Faster Throughput in Digitization of Special Collections, by Ricky Erway. The project site which includes a link to the report in pdf format is http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/capture/default.htm. Many thanks to Ricky for including my comments in the report.
– Article, Digitizing the Collection, in the current edition of Time Traveler magazine, published by The Henry Ford and available online at: http://www.thehenryford.org/timetraveler/ Provides insight as to how our digital material is being used, and features a fantastic picture of me hard at work.
– Brian