User:Mdd4696/Dickens
I recently discovered that the Rochester Institute of Technology library has a number of books from The Writings of Charles Dickens, a 32 volume set of Dickens' works, published in 1894. They contained interesting engravings of various scenes from the stories, so I decided to try and digitize the engravings in order to upload them to Wikimedia Commons.
Digitization[edit]
I used a Canon A710 IS digital camera mounted on a tripod to photograph each engraving. I chose not to use a flatbed scanner because I was worried about damaging the books' bindings (they seem to have deteriorated a bit) and because the scans produced by my scanner contain a significant amount of dust.
I used two lamps with compact fluorescent light bulbs to illuminate the book. I positioned the tripod with the camera facing straight down, as close to vertical over the book as I could manage. I also extended the tripod legs and used the camera's zoom in order to reduce any barrel distortion from the camera's lens.
In order to keep the pages of the book flat and keep the book open, I used some large allen wrenches. They are visible in some of the photos. The pages themselves were somewhat transparent, so I put a sheet of white laser printer paper underneath each digitized page so that the text from the next page would not show through.
I used the Program mode on my camera, and set the color to Black and White. This did not really reduce the image file sizes, however. I also made sure the white balance was set to "Tungsten". I used a 2 second delay so that I could let go of the camera before it took the photo. This made it very easy to get sharp, clear images.
Notes[edit]
I used a file naming scheme that should accommodate scans of additional pages in the books. The file names begin with the name of the series, followed by the volume, and then the page number. Images of the engravings are suffixed with (engraving).
I used Jpegcrop to losslessly rotate some of the images by 90º or 180º for the proper orientation.
I am willing to clean some of the images as the need arises, but it is too much work to do every single one. I would adjust the histogram, rotate and crop. I would suffix those image file names with (cleaned).