Page 6 - 2104

Saving History
By Dave Gish
Recently I found a scrap book that belonged to my
dad. It chronicled a trip dad, and his best friend Bob
took to Mexico. This trip took on extra significance
for me when I realized that it took place starting on
st
March 1 1941, eighty years ago. The pages were
black and my dad had written a narrative and log of
the trip in white ink on the pages along with the pic-
tures.
I decided to digitize the scrap book to preserve it
and give me a chance to share it with my brother
and his kids. The pages were 11-1/2” x 12” so the
pages wouldn’t fit into my scanner. I was able to
take the book apart and using an easel I photo-
graphed all of the pages (about 75 pages worth).
To print the pages out would be a problem. The
black paper would go through a lot of toner or black
ink. There were a few pages with either tickets or
color post cards which would mean having to print
some in color. I also wouldn’t be able to print all of
the way out to the edge of the page. This would
make the pages look strange and the text on the
page would be harder to read. I decided to create a
April 2021 6
PowerPoint presentation for the book. This turned
out very well. I made the background page black
and copied my camera photos onto the pages.
Now I have a digital copy of the book that keeps the
original feel of the scrap book.
I did lean a couple of tricks when taking the pictures
of the old scrap book pages. I bought an inexpen-
sive tripod from Michaels department store. I at-
tached a ruler vertically to the side of a white board
to keep the pages in the proper alignment on the
easel. I mounted my DSLR camera on a tripod and
manually set the focus and other settings. I was
able to slave the camera to my laptop so that I
could use the laptop as a viewfinder for the camera.
This also allowed me to take the photo by clicking a
button on the laptop. This is very helpful in avoiding
camera shake when snapping the picture. Since
there was about a 1” tab for the binding on one side
of the page I turned the back side of the pages up-
side/down to avoid having to realign the camera. It
was easy in post processing to flip the pictures back
to the proper orientation. For any camera geeks, I
used an ISO of 100 an Aperture setting of 11 and
(Continued on page 7)