senior professional photographer
The following is an unsolicited posting on a photo-equipment manufacturer’s moderated forum. The posting is slightly edited to disguise the identity of the person seeking advice.
a
member asked the entire forum for advice:
…I’m getting a decent scan when the camera is jacked way up on the copy stand and the aperture set at a smaller opening than usual. But often there is small text that makes it obvious one corner is too soft. Any basic advice?
another
member responded as below:
I would suspect alignment, or rather lack of it, if the soft portion is confined to one edge or corner.
If you're not using zig-align, which has been mentioned several times on this forum, well, you just have to, that's all. And if you've aligned the copy stand and camera in the normal position, you have to check alignment again when the camera is jacked way up because most likely the two positions will have significantly different alignments.
After twenty-five or thirty years of shooting art of all kinds, I fancied I was pretty good at lining up my camera and copy by eye, assisted by the ground-glass grid…until Better Light showed me how wrong I was. Their zig-align proved that no view camera, copy stand, enlarger, or even my own eye could be trusted.
Zig-align is a simple, ingenious, and inexpensive two-mirror alignment device designed by William Ziegler, a member of this forum. Details can be found at http://www.zig-align.com/ ...
Ben Blackwell
Senior Photographer
Berkeley Art Museum
University of California