Roger Hyam » Photography

More Relations

Tue, 25 May 2010 09:38:51 +0000

Chadwicks and Nicklins in the Same 1906 Photograph

These are some of my blood relations in 1906. The two guys on the right hand end of the second row down are Chadwicks and the first guy on the front row is a Nicklin.

St Stephen’s Old Church

Mon, 24 May 2010 20:43:43 +0000

St Stephen's Old Church Robin Hood's Bay

DIY Book Scanner: Learn By Doing

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:13:54 +0000

Almost Free Scanner

In the last weekend of the Christmas break I was sat in Starbucks in Waterstones in Edinburgh considering which of a stack of potential books I was going to spend my Christmas book tokens on. I had just been playing with a Sony eBook reader and so was thinking maybe I should take the plunge and go digital with books as well as the rest of my life.

I wondered what I would do with my existing books. It would be nice to be able search through these and have them all with me when I travel. There would be issues with copyright if I were to copy them but there would also be technical problems. How would I get them in EPUB or PDF format? I did some Googling and came across a great site diybookscanner.org. There are some really innovative designs on this site and it got my obsessive thoughts going. There were two problems.

I only had 48 hours to play before going back to work and my wife and kids wanted some of that time.
I didn’t have a workshop. Just a desk and some simple tools.

Could I produce a scanner in that time? Would it work?

Most of the plans on diybookscanner.org are pretty complex involving placing the book on a stand on a table and having multiple lights and cameras pointing down at it. I don’t have a table. At least I don’t have a table that isn’t already filled with stuff. So the design I came up with (pictured) turns the system upside down and puts the camera on a tripod near the floor. A frame made from some scrap wood holds a piece of glass from a clip picture frame. The camera is on a tripod on the floor. This is like some photocopiers for books. Lighting is provided by a desk lamp (fluorescent tube) under the desk at approx 45 degrees to the glass.

Setting up involves lying on the floor on your back to focus the camera and line it up with the page. This may be the usability issue that will prevent me commercialising it!

Example Page Image

In operation I have an electronic cable release on the floor that I press with my big toe keeping both hands free to manipulate the book. I take the right page, turn the book round and take the left page (the other way up), pick the book up and turn the page, repeat right and left. I did a 228 page book in under 30 minutes like this. The book was Gotama The Buddha by Ananda Coomaraswamy which I believe is out of copyright.

The resulting images are sideways on and need to be rotated 90 degrees alternately left or right. I wrote a PHP5 command line script (process_src.php) to do this. It will also do simple cropping. There is an example page image shown.

This combination means I can get from physical book to page images pretty quickly for a small book. I can flick through the pages on my laptop but they are nothing without OCR and I have run out of time! The brief attempts I have had at OCRing some of the page images have been pretty disappointing.

Is the OCR the achilles heal of the process? If I did get good OCR how easy would it be to get the text into re-flowing EPUB or similar format. These will have to be the subjects of more thought and perhaps more experimenting if I find the time.

One thing is for sure – I have more of an appreciation for the imaging process and eBook world.

Note: I do not condone the breach of copyright. Authors deserve paying for their work

Important Note: Be very careful if you try and make one of these as you end up with a piece of glass strapped to the edge of a table which is dangerous – particularly with kids around. Put a guard on it when you aren’t using it.

KAP – Another photographic box ticked

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 11:12:48 +0000

Cwm yr Eglwys - Wind too strong.

You may not have heard of it but Kite Aerial Photography is quite a widespread hobby. It involves strapping a camera to a kite and flying it over something interesting. The camera can be fired remotely or just on a timer. Serious people build complex radio control rigs to move the camera around and point it in different directions.

Doing silly things with cameras appeals to me so, when I realized that my older compact digital camera (a Nikon Coolpix S1) had a feature to fire a shot every 30 seconds, I just had to give it a go. I built a rig using the Picavet suspension system. Bought a large kite for £30 and took it on holiday to West Wales. The result was terrifying!

Picavet Cross with Nikon S1

Maybe I am overstating it but it is harder than it looks. Firstly, if the wind is too low the kite won’t stay up so you drag your camera along the ground. Then if it is too strong the kite bounces around in the sky and waves the camera about so much the images are blurred. Here are two of my results.

I flew the kite at Cwm yr Eglwys which is a sheltered bay but it was quite a windy day. As the kite reached a good height the wind took it and flapped it like a flag – hence the blurred picture. Most importantly it was scary. That is me with my hat on looking scared in the photo. This is a popular place and there were people around so I was trying to control a large kite on the end of a cheese-wire-like line that was going to either decapitate someone or take the weather vane off the ruined church.

Whitesands Bay - Just enough wind

On Whitesands bay the wind was just about strong enough so I got more stable pictures but the subject wasn’t so interesting and I didn’t have a long enough line to get the kite higher. This is actually a good shot of a British holiday – people trying to keep warm on the beach.

Analyzing my results I think I am using the wrong kind of kite. I had a cheap sledge type kite when I should really be going for a more sophisticated parafoil that is specifically designed for stability – but these come in at the best part of £200. Then I could use a camera with image stabilization – another expense. Also my Picavet system wasn’t very good as the line didn’t run smoothly through it – I could buy little pulleys to put on it. All these things would make the system work much better.

The most important ingredient needed is time. You need to be in the right place at the right time where light AND wind are come together. With a young family and a job this is rarely likely to coincide with the brief periods I get away from chores on holiday. My conclusion on Kite Aerial Photography is therefore: fun to try once. Maybe I’ll come back to it in 20 years when I retire.

The photographic techniques I still haven’t tried are object movies and stereo. These are infinitely doable for little money so maybe in the next year or so. There is also holography. I once read about doing this in high school science classes with a visible laser and a bead of mercury – I’ll probably have to let that one go.

Old Boats from Shady Past

Sun, 24 May 2009 11:15:37 +0000

Last weekend we got away from the city for the first time this year to camp in Northumberland and visited The Holy Island of Lindisfarne. This is a tourist mecca of an island accessible via a causeway that is only open at low tide. Think of many retired people with ice creams and you will get the picture. It is a lovely place though.

One day I will write something of my feelings for the fishing industry in the North Sea and how it is symptomatic of our whole inability to act over the environment.

Former Herring Boat on Holy Island

But as usual I have little time so here are my photos of how rustic and wonderful the whole thing was – which is pretty much how the tourist industry paints it. None of the interpretative material you find in these places talks about what an environmental disaster it was and continues to be. So lets just celebrate how easy and what fun digital photography really is!

Yet another former Herring Boat on Holy Island

Mon, 11 May 2009 18:44:00 +0000

This is where we will dissect the alien

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:33:40 +0000

DC 2 Meeting Room NHM London

My First ‘Serious’ Edinburgh Gigapan

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 21:49:02 +0000

View this full screen!

This is my first reasonably high resolution Gigapan. It is around 760 megapixel. It was a dark day on Saturday but I am quite happy with the results. You can see this pan along with some of my other efforts on my Gigapan home page. What I think is really ‘cool’ – and there is no other word for it I am afraid – is the ability to view these panoramas in Google Earth. If you have version 4.2 or later installed on your machine you can click on this link and it should launch Google Earth and

My Maternal Grandparents Wedding

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 12:00:52 +0000

Maternal Grandparents Wedding (1928)

My maternal grandparents were in the Salvation Army. This is their wedding in 1928. It is worth clicking on the image and having a closer look. It is one of those photographs where you feel you can connect with the people in it. I wonder why it has that feel when some photos don’t. Was it something to do with the atmosphere of the day? I wonder if any of the children are alive today. They would be in their 80’s I guess.

Walk in the Woods

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 08:02:24 +0000

Walk in the Woods