Album art setup

I've made a second pass at getting setup to efficiently take photos of the album covers. I rejected the idea of using a scanner since finding one that would handle up to 12.5" x 12.5" looked to be frightfully expensive and the chore of stitching multiple scans together just seemed WAY too labor intensive. I had a mini-tripod that I tried using (first pass) but I couldn't get the memory card out of the camera without unscrewing the mount. That meant that almost all the setup had to be done over again every session. I also had to setup the lighting every time. Kristi had some things, that I have adopted, that seem to have helped me fairly easily generate what I think are passable images. She had a small light fixture on an adjustable arm. I'm pretty sure that it originally went with a vintage sewing machine. The cylindrical body of the light fixture fit into a bracket at the end of the arm and a screw clamped it in place. The diameter of the bracket is slightly larger than the lens housing on my Canon SD-400. I took the lamp off of it and I used some furniture clamps to hold the base of the arm onto the edge of Kristi's drawing board. The drawing board had two adjustable lamps mounted on it and I aimed them at the album at a very shallow angle to minimize any reflected glare. I set the camera for no-flash and a 10-second shutter delay. The shutter delay allows me to get the camera re-positioned in the event that I jostled it by pressing the shutter button. The camera simply balances on the bracket at the end of the arm and so getting the memory chip out and putting it back in is relatively painless. Initially I started taking images of the album covers only in the case where the album art doesn't come down from the net. But once I got set up to take the front cover, flipping it over and taking the back cover is a trivial amount of extra effort.

One of the beauties of using the Blog is that I can associate as many images as I want with an album instead of just the one that Media Player limits me to. So, if I can bring up the album art (front, back, sleeve, etc.) on my computer monitor, that's one less reason to have to handle the album again in the future. I see that as a positive preservationist step. The down side is: I'm now inclined to photograph the album even when the cover art comes down from the net so that I can have the additional views of the album to put on the blog.

A side benefit of being set up to photograph the albums is that it will help me to eBay any surplus albums if I ever get around to that.