Light has become particularly important to me lately, especially good light. My house has a vaulted ceiling with recessed lights, which is great for atmosphere but hell for scanning photos. If I had an actual photo scanner, the quality of my light sources might not be such a big deal, but since that’s not in the budget right now, I have to make do with my phone and my CamScanner app (which I love, by the way).

I’ve been working on this project at my dining room table, which is surrounded by windows on one end, owing to the extra-large bay window on the front of the house. We get a lot of really nice light through that window most of the time, and I’ve found that indirect natural light seems to work best for trying to scan all of my many, many photos. Any time I turn on the overhead lights in the dining room, I get crazy glare off the top of the table. And whenever I turn on the living room lights, I get ridiculous shadows because then I’m backlit.

If I had a longer cord on my lamp, it might enable me to work longer into the night, which would be kind of nice, but then again, by the time I get finished with an afternoon of photo scanning, my neck is killing me. Again, an actual photo scanner would probably help with this (and it would have to be faster), but it’s just not in my budget right now.

How about you – do you have lots of old photos? What do you do with them all?

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