COPYING PHOTOS

My Copy Cameras

The Beginnings in 1998 with my Olympus C1400 digital camera

Having thousands of negatives and slides carefully stored away over the years I decided it would be a good thing to digitise them so they could be saved for future generations, should anyone want to see them. I started over 20 years ago with a good Epsom scanner. Aftre a few weeks of experimentation I decided scanning was too slow and boring, taking a few minutes for each frame.

I decided to make what we called a 'rostrum' camera. That is simply a camera mounted vertically above a baseboard (I used my old enlarger stand). I needed back lighting for slides and negatives and top lighting for prints. Fluorescent strip lights were tried and proved to be a disaster as the exposures were totally erratic.

Now not a lot of people know this, but a digital camera exposure system works very differently from a film camera. For example the OM2 film camera opens the shutter and starts to measure the light, When it has had enough light it closes the shutter, so the exposure is a measure of the actual light reaching the film. However a digital camera firstly samples the light and a fraction later takes the photo based on the light it has read previously. Perfectly OK for most normal light situations. With 'normal' fluorescent light run from a 50Hz mains supply the light is in fact pulsing at 100Hz not noticed by the human eye. A digital camera measures the light and a fraction later takes the photo at which time the light has changed - result disaster.

The answer was to drive the tubes from a high frequengy oscillator running at around 40KHz so the measuring window and the exposure window would both contain several cycles and hence the light would be similar in both. Result - success.

The original tests were done with my first digital camera an Olympus DSLR C1400. 1.4 mega pixel.

Fitted with a close up lens it worked very well and was used for most of the images for the Rye Castle Museum job.

It was also used on the whole of the Copthorne Millennium history archive, over 1500 images

As time went on I had a range of cameras after the Olympus C1400, starting with an Olympus C2500, a Canon Powershot G2, then G9 and on to a Sony F828, a Sony R1 then on to Nikons D5000, D5100 and D5500. All were used as rostrum cameras and each worked better than its predecessor.

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The Olympus C1400 SLR camera.

So advanced for its time, bought in 1998 for over £1000 it worked superbly, if rather slow. It took 15 seconds to write a frame so you could not take a series of photos quickly.

It didn't even have a preview screen to see what you had just taken. It used the first ever memory card that slotted into an adaptor for a 3.5" floppy drive to read it and had a maximum capacity of 4 mega pixels, enough for about 20 photos.

One of the first photos taken on it. We popped back home and printed an album of photos and preseted it to the couple at the reception. Click on it to see full quality

They were all amazed.

The New Copy Camera Setup

The system was used as above until earlier this year (2019) when I had got fed up with transferring photos from memory cards, and real difficulties were experienced being able to copy colour negatives and reverse them into good colour balanced images. I know there are plug-ins for Photoshop for doing this and there are lots of people on the web telling you how to go about it. Lots of ideas were tried but with no real success. Also It was set up in another room upstairs so there was lots of traipsing up and down to the computer and back.

Looking at specs of new cameras I was very taken with a new Sony compact camera the RX100/4.

My photography was now mainly candid shots of family and grandchildren, this camera has a amazingly fast autofocus system and a proper eye level viewfinder and is small enough to be pocketable, so I bought one.

It lives up to its spec perfectly and also comes with remote operation software so it can be completely driven and powered from the computer or android smartphone. In this mode the photos are saved directly on the computer so no file transfer is required.

I decided it was worth having a go at adapting it as a small copy camera to cover all negative sizes up to 5 x4 inches and prints up to enprint size which covers nearly everything most people have.

I decided it was a perfect project for 3D printing. Firstly I had to find some close up lenses and was rewarded wit a set of 4 Canon 58 mm lenses (1, 2, 4 and macro lenses on the web for around £15.

Considerable thought was given in to how mount the camera. The whole lens drives out of the camera when it is switched on so there was no hope of attaching anything to the lens for fear of disaster on shut down.

I decided the lens of the camera sholud sit inside a tube, the camera body supported on the top end of the tube. The close up lens(es) were fitted in the bottom of the tube, whose length had been calculated for the camera lens to be just clear of the close up lenses in its most extended mode.

Plastic screws were fitted to hold the camera and the close up lenses.

Now a base was designed as a light box and a piece of 20 mm aluminium angle fitted vertically as the camera support. A part was designed to slide over the upright and fix to the camera support tube.

Strips of white LEDs were fitted in the light box which had an opal perspex top diffuser window fitted.

Next a set of film holders for 35 mm film, half frame, slides, 4x4 and 6x6 films were designed and made with guide rails and weighted arms to keep the films in place and allowing easy advance to the next frame.

Now for the prints. A vacuum adaptor was made that fitted over the light box, using a cheap vacuum pump bought on Amazon for £6.

A double light bar was made tha attached to the support bar so the light for the prints could be raised or lowered to suit. More of the LED white strips were fitted to them.

The vacuum hesd works perfectly holding the prints absolutely flat for photography.

Altogether a couple of weeks work and all was ready.

Photos without the camera fitted as it was used to take them !!