I was in Alendale SC on a consulting job when Bob, the owner of the company I was at, asked about copying old photos and his yearbook from high school. His reunion is coming up and he wanted content for the reunion website. He had already tried the scanner on his desk but the size of the scanner was a bit of a handicap. Bob has a Canon G9. This is sort of a bridge level point and shoot. It has a good 12mp chip and at its lowest ISO (80) with appropriate lighting it will give comparable image quality to a prosumer Dslr. Way more than enough for the web but the lighting was the real issue. 
Enter the humble hardware clip on light and compact florescent light bulbs. CFLs are available in a daylight color temp and can be bought most anywhere. Four 27 watt daylight CFLs (each equivalent to 100w incandescent but almost no heat) are plenty of light for this project. In fact we only went with 4 to be perfectly symmetrical. Two could have done the job.
Enter the humble hardware clip on light and compact florescent light bulbs. CFLs are available in a daylight color temp and can be bought most anywhere. Four 27 watt daylight CFLs (each equivalent to 100w incandescent but almost no heat) are plenty of light for this project. In fact we only went with 4 to be perfectly symmetrical. Two could have done the job. 
The biggest challenge was mounting the camera. Normally I would use a Bogen Magic Arm for this but none were available at the time. So we tore apart a cheep tripod and mounted the column and head on a projector stand. The G9 can out-put the viewfinder video either to a tv or a computer so you don’t have to stand on the desk to frame photos. We went with the computer option so that all of the cameras controls are easily at hand. The rest is point and shoot.
There are some real advantages to using a camera for copy work. The most obvious is speed. The camera captures the whole image in far less than a second a scanner can take a minute or more pre file. For my work flow it is easier to crop and edit a number of files in light room than to have to deal with individual files. Best yet the G9 is one of the few point and shoot cameras that produces Raw files so I am not losing data by making then editing jpgs. For the highest level of quality such as for restoration or enlargements I would start with the scanner or my 21mp Canon 5dmkII. But for this project and considering that Bob already had the G9, it works.
