Copying My Baby Picture Frame

During the past 2 years I've documented my family history, including my paternal and maternal grandparents, and their ancestors. I'm now writing about my youth in Hawaii. To do this, I've had to scan whatever pictures I could gather about my past: parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, pets, homes, and, of course, me.

One of the pictures my parents kept in their bedroom was a sequence of pictures taken by a photo house called Babyland. Back in 1947-48, my mother carted me off to the professional photographer to have my pictures taken. Four pictures were placed in a simple white frame. Despite the ravages of time, these 60 year old pictures still retain much of the charm my parents enjoyed.

I could not scan the pictures in the frame, because the frame was much larger than my scanner allowed. I did not want to scan the individual pictures, because what I will always remember is the sequence of pictures in my parents' bedroom.

So I decided to digitally photograph the pictures in the frame. That is, I would "scan" the pictures with my Nikon D200 DSLR, and then crop the frame to suit.

First I setup a comfortable place to lay the frame. I couldn't easily make it vertical, but I chose our fireplace, because it gave me a lot a working room. Putting the frame on the floor presented more problems with my tripod, so I didn't go that direction. Second, I setup 2 flashes at about 40 degrees, each from camera axis. One, on the right was a Nikon SB-800 set on SU-4 mode. I measured the light w/ a Minolta IV-F flash meter, and it read f5.6.5 with ASA 200 and at 1/16 power (this was a good guess, because I wanted f8.0 for depth of field. The second flash I hand-held, because I didn't have another stand. This flash was a Nikon SB-80DX, and it read f8.0 at 1/16 power. How did I rationalize the flashes? The SB-800 was stronger, so I made it's power 1/16 -1/3, or down 1/3 stop from 1/16 power. Now when I measured both flashes w/ the Minolta, I got an exact f8.0. This was nice and lucky. Usually there is some plus/minus in tenths from what I want.

How did I sync the flashes? I used the D200's manual mode at 1/128 power (actually, no effect on exposure). The SB-800 was on SU-4 mode (triggered by a flash, not the Nikon CLS system), and the SB-80DX was on Remote (triggerd by a flash, not on-camera). the SB-800 was set at 50mm, while the SB-80DX was at 28mm (by oversight). This really didn't matter, because the camera was at 45 mm (67mm by 35mm stds), so the extra spread of the flashes evened out to be unnoticeable.

I merely had to adjust the angle of the camera to be coincident with the angle of the frame on the fireplace. Note, the flashes were about the same height as the camera, and equidistant from the picture frame. If I had to do it again, I would put the right-hand flash on a light-stand, something I should purchase soon (think, Manfrotte 3373 (5001B) lightweight). Note that I'm holding the left-hand flash with my left hand, and I attached a remote cord, which I used to trigger the camera/built-in flash. If I had the extra lightstand, I would not have had to use the remote cord.

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