More Info On Digitizing Photos

I had an epiphany last night and I really do know how I came up with it.  It just popped into my head somehow.  I figured out a new way to transfer old photo’s that works at night when there isn’t any good daylight like I talked about in my post Digitizing Old Photos Using A Digital Camera. I found an old picture to give it a try and see if my idea was worth a pile of beans or not.  It is really simple actually. I just used my a flash on the camera.  Not the one that comes with the camera, but an external flash, in my case a Canon Speedlight 580EX. 

With this flash, you can direct the flash anywhere you want, so I just pointed it straight up from the camera to bounce the flash.   As I took the picture of the old photograph that was lying on the table, the camera was pointed down and the flash was pointed at a nearby wall.  I took the photo and the light bounced off of the wall so there is an even light on the photo and no harsh lighting issues on the photo.  Since the color on the wall was beige and wasn’t white, there was a slight color shift in the photo which I quickly corrected for in Photoshop.  Here is the finished result. 

This is like a 10 year old picture of Mike (left) and Rob (Right) on a water ride.  If I am not mistaken, it was a Geauga Lake (which I think was bought out by Sea World) in Aurora Ohio.  I think they enjoyed getting wet much more than I did.  Luckily I had this small waterproof camera which worked quite nicely to get this photo. Rob got the worst of it and was pretty much drenched.