Use of Digital Camera for Genealogy

You can read an interesting "thread" of messages in the EOGN Forum right now concerning the use of digital cameras for genealogy purposes. I was especially interested in A. R. Wilson's detailed description on how to obtain high quality pictures and also with JGR's and John R.'s comments about how they take photographs of documents and then process them with a free OCR program, converting them to text.

You can read the messages at: http://www.eogn.com/forum/index.php/topic,61.0.html.

Comments

[Israel Pickholtz - Jerusalem]

I have been using a Pentax Optima 33L for some years now, to my great satisfaction. Unfortunately, when we moved last summer, I lost the cable that connects the camera to my USB. There is something not quite right with card in the camera, so I cannot download photos using a card holder either. No one here in Israel can get me this cable, so I am stuck, both regarding the photos I have and the ones I want to take. Does anyone know where I can get this cable?

[Martin Tolley]

You could try -
www.MemoryForLess.co.uk
they have a very large range. Even if your model isn't listed the site has pictures of connectors so you should be able to find something that will work.

[Jim Jackson]

I have a Nikon Coolpix 995 (3.34 mega pixels) that has served me well over the last several years. The feature that I like is that the lens swivels 270 degrees to make any tripod, copystand or microfilm brace work well. I used to use a tripod with the center shaft reversed so that the camera pointed down. I now use a portible Lumiere copystand that I can fold up in a small brief case.

I have photographed several thousand books for my website www.michlist.com which is a cumulative full-name index of military and historical books.

I don't use the macro as I'm usually more than a foot away. The macro feature is great for taking a blow-up of something a few inches away, but is just a blur at a foot or more, at least on my camera. I use the lowest quality size (2,404 images on a 1.0 GB memory card) and the image has always been clear when I use it at home. I can blow it up so that a word covers the screen.

Because I digitize the entire book, I photograph all the odd pages first, then working back, do all the even pages. This is much faster, less wear on the book, and I rename the images by their page numbers, or by the first three letters of the first name if the entire book is just an index to another book. It may sound like a lot of extra work, but in each folder named for the LOC number, the images are in page order, or I can go right to the name I'm searching for. The trade off is spending less time at the library/archive (where my time is limited) by spending a bit more time at home in my slippers. OmniPage converts the photos directly to text, but must be proofread. Some images it just fails at and it often confuses 1/l and 0/O.

Jim Jackson
Battle Creek, MI

[Andrea]

I actually use my camera to take pictures of the last three generations of my family, and for my grandfather's 80th birthday, we gave him a digital photo frame full of photos from 1910 to the present. I have never seen him even get teary eyed before, but that did it.