OVER 2 YOU 190 (27/07/04)

IN THE FRAME

I want to use my digital camera to take photos of framed prints, with clear glass in front. Can anyone suggest how I can avoid, or remove reflections of the camera in the photograph?

John Lyon-Maris, via email

A number of points spring to mind. Switch off the camera's flash. Make sure you have good diffused all round lighting, if need be, put a piece of tracing paper in front of light sources to avoid harsh highlights and shadows, try to use a bounced light source by pointing any lights towards a nearby light coloured wall or ceiling and not straight at the subject. Use a polarising filter on your lens and this will help to cut any remaining reflections
J. M. Graumann, Hamburg, Germany

Use a large sheet of matt black cardboard with a small hole cut in the centre for the camera lens to shoot through. Alternatively a black velvet drape will also suffice. Make sure that any light source in use does not fall onto the camera lens. If you do get a slight image of the lens on the photo, this can be removed by using the clone brush tool in Paint Shop Pro.

Pat Heigham, via email

I recently took pictures of a friend's watercolours both framed and unframed. They were all shot on a vertical easel with studio lights. To deal with the reflections, the framed pictures with glass were shot with the lights raised up above the picture (up to the ceiling), the shots were done at night and the camera and lens were black and I wore a black shawl! The resultant photograph shows only the picture.

Sophie Wilson, via email

There are several possibilities: Photograph via a neutral filter or via reflection from an unsilvered glass surface. The unwanted reflection then passes via the filter (or mirror) twice, the light from the picture only once. But more illumination will be necessary to offset the filter or mirror loss.

Photograph a piece of glass with a black surface behind it. Subtract the resulting image from each of the pictures using photo-editing software. In theory this should allow perfect cancellation, but if the glass on the prints is not perfectly flat (and it probably won't be) the distorted reflections from them might be impossible to cancel completely.

Tilt the pictures to avoid the reflection. This will distort the image; I don't know whether any photo editing software is around to correct this. Some defocusing at the edges will also occur. These faults might be not be so very bad if you can use a long focal length lens with a narrow aperture. A lot will depend on what you want to use your photos for.

Move the camera sideways without tilting it. No distortion or defocusing, but you'll only be using a fraction of the camera's sensor, so resolution will suffer.
Mr Chris Collins, Llandrindod Wells

The classic way of doing this is to use a copy stand with the camera directly above the framed print and illuminated with two lights at approx. 45 degrees to the print. Do this in a darkened room and with light sources approximating to daylight for best colour reproduction. With the lights adjusted properly there are normally no reflections.

John Bullen, via email

After many years working in the darkroom, the only way to copy any document in a glass frame is to remove it from the frame. If you don't then there will always be reflections in the glass especially.

Fraser Jordan, Ballachulish, Argyll

SEARCHABLE DATABASE

I am doing ICT for GCSE and for my coursework I am organising old photographs and postcards for my Parish Museum. I need to create a searchable database of the digital images of the photographs. I want to be able to associate key words and information with each image, and search on a combination of key words and text content. I have been working with MS Access, but I do not find it very easy to use. I wonder if your readers have any suggestions for software that would help me. The Museum does not have a large budget so they cannot afford to buy expensive software.
Lizzie Rowse (age 14), via email

Lizzie could easily set up a simple, searchable database for her parish photos and postcards in Word. First, create a table with two columns and a row for each image. In column one, insert a low-resolution thumbnail JPEG image of the photos in each row and their reference numbers. In the rows in column 2, write relevant details of each image - e.g., date, provenance and a caption explaining what the photo depicts.  Then, use Word's 'search' facility (F5) to look for key words (e.g., parish church, school fete). Keep high-resolution images of all the photos and postcards in a separate file, for access after selecting the required images from the Word file. This system works well for my collection of nearly 2,000 images.

Paul Tritton, via email

I agree that MS Access is not easy to use. Many years ago when Windows 3.1 was all the rage I installed MS Works 3, although I have since upgraded to version 4.5 and still use it all the time on Windows 98. In this package there is an excellent database, which is simple to set up and easy to use. I am sure it would do anything required by Lizzie.

Brian Cleathero, via email

LinPHA is a photograph database, which may do all that Lizzie Rowse requires.  It requires a web server (preferably Apache) with the PHP module installed and a MySQL database, all of which is available for use with many web hosting companies.  All the software required is free and may be downloaded from the following pages:
http://linpha.sourceforge.net/ - LinPHA
http://httpd.apache.org/ - Apache Web Server
http://www.php.net/ - PHP
 http://www.mysql.com/ - MySQL
 
An Apache webserver can be installed on either Windows or Linux, but it is recommended that Windows 95, 98 or ME should not be used for a public site for security reasons.
Joseph Haig, Manchester

CAN YOU HELP

I use an Excel worksheet for the Timekeeper's script in Cowes Week yacht racing.  Can anyone help me to superimpose a running time clock, and a repeating countdown stopwatch, on the worksheet as it is being used at full
screen size on my laptop?
George Brown, via email

Yesterday I was sent 53 emails with the Netsky virus attached. Today there were over 80 of them in my Inbox. Fortunately they were all safely intercepted by my anti-virus software, but I would like to know if this is some kind of record?

Henry Philips, via email