My Bodgied Up Copy Stand

[Ray]

For many years I have used a copy stand loaned to me by my 96 year old mate and keen amateur photographer, whom I help out with his computer from time to time. It is adequate for most jobs, but the post is a little short for some of the large jobs we get at the Local History Centre.

Today I went to the local Lions Club Sale and found several very expensive old photo enlargers that were being got rid of by the local TAFE college. They are still current models and worth about $950-$1000, but I guess, with the passing of film photography they are now surplus to their needs and I managed to buy two for $10. One of which, with the judicious use of an angle grinder and a spot of matt black spray paint, I converted into a very robust copy stand for document copying. I nearly broke my miserable little heart to take to these beautiful pieces of kit with the "ankle grinder" but it was worth it in the end.

[Ray]

I've been playing with my new toy over the last couple of days, and it's working every bit as well as I had hoped.

I have discovered one minor problem though, and that is with the vertical camera alignment, (up and down as you look at the rear of the camera). This means that the resulting photos are very slightly "key holed", which is a kind of perspective distortion that can be easily corrected with most photo editing programs.



However I would prefer that it does not have to be done, even though in my case it is barely noticeable.

When I adapted the stand, I had to space the camera out from the sliding head a little so that the carrier plate did not interfere with the focus ring on the lens. I did this, by making up an aluminium block about 8mm thick to fit between the carrier plate and the camera base. It would appear that it was not exactly parallel sided and will need some slight adjustment.  

That will be one of tomorrow's jobs.

[Ray]

Yesterday I received the Right Angle Viewer that I ordered several days ago, to make using the copy stand a lot easier.

I had looked at the genuine Nikon article only to find that it cost half as much as my camera,  so I decided to settle for a Chinese "knock off".  Well,... so far I can't fault it, and considering that it was nearly $400 cheaper, I don't feel any guilt in buying it off Ebay. It appears to be quite robust and well finished, the optics are clear and bright with +/- 2 diopter focus adjustment, 1x - 3.3x magnification, with 360 degree rotation, the kit also includes eyepiece adapters for most other brands of camera.



The instruction sheet was something else again though, containing such gems as, "This product is a precise and optical instrument, pleasing watch for to defeng the tide dust palliative"   I felt so sorry for other English language recipients that I actually re-wrote their Instructions and emailed them back to the manufacturers. My corrections may not be perfect, but at least they will stop a lot of head scratching from other buyers.

[Ray]

My Slide and Negative copier is slowly coming along.

I've still got to space out the camera another 20mm to line it up with the light stage below it. I'd like to make it adjustable but just haven't found the right parts to do it yet.


The photo shows the standard 18-55 mm lens with an ultra macro lens on the front which will allow me to focus down to 10:1  or 1/10 the size of the CCD sensor in the camera.  This should allow me to make a matchhead just about fill the photo field. I've been told that it might be better to use some lens tube extensions instead of the macro lens, as they don't distort the edges as  much, so they are on order from EBay.  The black box below the negative carrier will house a variable brightness LED light box for illuminating the slides or negatives,...  I'm still waiting for it to be delivered as well.

After that I might think about two more LED flood lamps to illuminate the top for  doing copying and macro work.  I've given the poor old  Bank account a fair sort of pizzling this last fortnight, with a 3KW Solar system and a new 250 ltr hot water service, so I might just have to take it quietly for a month or two.

[Ray]

Since my last post in this thread i have managed to locate a LED light box and adapt it to take a small plug pack type power supply. It is a little larger than i anticipated, so there will need to be several other changes, but they will have to wait until I receive the device I've ordered to correctly position the slide or negative, inline with the camera.



This will be screwed to the lower stage and the light box and slide holder will be fixed to the top platform, giving me 10cms of adjustment both front and back and left and right.

Last night I did some preliminary trials with the lightbox and slide box just sitting in place and got some truly great results. Once everything is firmly fixed, all i will have to do is set it up, and feed the slides into the holder, then click the remote shutter release. I estimate that I should be easily able to copy 10 slides a minute which is about 50 times faster than copying them on a flatbed scanner then using software to straighten, size and crop them. So far the results look better too.


For those of you who may be interested the shot is of Yanningurie waterhole, just south of the Strezlecki crossing and was taken in May 1980. We had waited until sundown to see if we could catch a duck on the water but were sorely disappointed.

I could never have copied this slide so clearly by any other method I've had access to in the past. If you look at the sky you can quite clearly see the mark where I wiped the slide with a lens cleaner prior to copying,... Yeah, I know i did a crappy job of cleaning the slide, but the camera has captured the evidence of this. The fact that you can see the upper and left hand edge of the cardboard slide frame is the reason why a precisely adjustable table is needed to accurately position them for copying.

[Ray]

I've had my first minor setback with this project today. (Total cost $8)

I had ordered a cheap set of extension tubes to enable me to do better macro shots, only to find out that because my current lens is of the Camera controlled automatic variety, when I use the extension tubes I lose the ability to control the aperture, and it closes down to F:16 and the camera will then only work in Manual mode so I can't change the speed to compensate for it. This results in very underexposed shots,...  almost black in fact.

Ahh, well, back to the drawing board. I'll just continue using my old screw on macro lens which i don't think is as good, but it will have to do for the moment as I've just about flattened my pocket money for the moment

On the good side of the books, i received the first of two 160 LED flood lamps for my copy stand, it works beautifully but I'd like to adapt it from battery power to using a 6-9V plug pack, it shouldn't be too much trouble as I tested it today just using some patch cords and it works a treat. The lamp's power consumption is very low, with six AA batteries supposed to last about 4 hours, however I'd much rather use a mains power supply.

Slowly , slowly catchee monkey,....

[Ray]

Hmmm,...  I'm getting rather anxious. I ordered my adjustable cross slide for slide copying three weeks ago and it still has not arrived. Now I'm fully aware that the Chinese postal system is glacially slow in it's mail handling but in the past it is very rare for delivery to take this amount of time.

The really frustrating thing about it is that there is really nothing I can do from this end and I doubt that there is anything that can be done from the other end. I think that I might just start a bit of a paper trail by informing the seller of what is going on, in case it has gone astray.

I had hoped that by now i could be amazing you all with the results of my fabulous "invention",.... either that, or giving you all a laugh at my inglorious failure.

Either way, it's a bit disappointing at present.

[Ray]

Y'see,... it worked.

Yesterday I had a bit of a whinge about my purchase not arriving and, Lo and behold, it arrived that afternoon. Here it is being used below

 


I've spent quite a few hours fiddling about getting it straight and level, and attached to the lower stage, this necessitated some rather severe surgery with the "ankle grinder' and the hacksaw, but a quick dab on the grinder and a coat of matt black BBQ paint and it's up and running, having had it's first test run.

It's far from perfect as yet, but it's an improvement on my previous arrangements using flat bed scanners etc. The results so far seem to be at least as good, and it's about 4-5 times faster and far less fiddly once it's set up.

All I have to do now is convince TLW that I deserve a rather specialised lens for macro photography now to allow it to be used to it's maximum potential.

[Ray]

We're getting closer to the finished article now.

I have spent much of the day finishing the brackets for the lighting and making a wiring loom to fit. The wiring is the one thing that I think I will eventually try to improve though, with some nice flexible "curley cords" to try and make things look a bit neater, but for the moment, everything seems to be working, so I'm content for now.



From the look of the photo I'd say that I should have turned down the lamps a bit, the glare has made it look fuzzy.

It now has virtually everything I planned for it.  A micro adjustable back lit stage for copying negatives and slides and also a pair of 5500deg Kelvin, (daylight white) 320 lux, variable intensity cold LED lamps.  I guess the next thing is to try out the lighting for copying something a little different like a photo in a glass fronted frame.

[Susie]

So now we can find all our old slides and bring them in to you!! Gee that will keep you busy for weeks/months/years!!  Ha Ha!

[Ray]

I've got to do my own first, about 3000 at last estimate.

At the moment my lens is just not quite good enough to copy the image only with slides. I get that thin black framing effect as you can see in the photo in post half way up the page. Th trouble is that a good 1:1 macro lens costs half as much as my camera. The poor old bank balance has taken a bit of a battering this year with unplanned trips interstate, the solar system, a new hot water service,... not to mention my toys,....

I have little doubt that it will come in time,... but only if I'm really, really good.

[Ray]

I posted above about how I really needed (wanted) to purchase that special Macro lens for my camera. I have done something  that I normally try to avoid,... I have settled for something less than my original intention. In view of my recent spending spree I settled for what I considered to be the next best thing, a set of automatic extension tubes, costing only about 1/8th as much. They are a relatively cheap and supposedly foolproof way of achieving the same end as the lens.



I have been reading up all of the available information on both the lens and the extension tubes and finally decided that the cost advantage far outweighed any possible lack of versatility.  

The tubes themselves contain no optics whatsoever and achieve the same end as the lens by moving the standard lens further from the focal plane of your camera. This allows the camera to focus at much shorter distances which in effect makes you able to photograph small items at a far greater size. The tubes come in three lengths to achieve varying degrees of magnification, 12mm, 20mm and 36mm and can be used either singly or "piggy backed" in any combination giving 8 different lengths and degrees of magnifications.

Yesterday they arrived and I quickly set about trying them out, mainly just to check that they were the right ones to fit  both my camera and my 18-55mm kit lens that came with the camera. I found that my problems with being able to get close enough to avoid that black "frame" around my slides was easily achievable by using just the 20mm extension and disposing of my old magnifying lens that I had used previously.

As yet I have not taken any photos as I want to go through the slides and give them a good clean. They have always been kept in boxes, however dust is still a problem and taking 30 seconds to clean each one is far quicker and easier than trying to clean up all of the dust marks in a photo editing program later.

For anyone who may be interested there are a number of sites where various "experts" express their opinions and explanations as to their uses, I found the simplest here on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg7Wm7qLPR0

[Ray]

One of the problems encountered in copying your slides using a camera is that many if not all cameras produce a photo  that is usually larger than the  image in the View finder or screen on the rear of the camera.  It's usually not a lot larger, but it can cause you to end up with your copies having a black "frame" around them as the photo includes the edge of the slide frame as can be seen in the copied slide further up the page.  

The photo can be cropped out using any of a number of image editing programs, however it is time consuming, so this is the way I feel best suits my needs.

To overcome this problem a printed up a grid pattern that would allow me to deduce exactly how much over lap my cameras lens actually had and once this had been determined A similar but simpler reticule could be printed and mounted in a slide frame. To give the paper some rigidity and also make it a little more translucent I have coated it with Super glue. I noticed the added clarity when the glue holding the slide frame halves together seeped out into the paper, The easiest way to fix it was to coat the remainder of the paper which now feels like white plastic sheet.



The camera is then adjusted so that I can clearly see a white border around the inner black line. Once this has been done the slides may be cycled through the holder one after another knowing that each one will be held in precisely the right position. It takes a minute to set up, but then it's merely a matter of pushing the slides though and operating the shutter via a remote control to stop any possibility of movement.