For all the students of New Testament exegesis and the history surrounding the texts, the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts is a wonderful treasure of free high quality images. I highly recommend spending some time browsing through the manuscripts. Most, if not all, of these have never been in the public eye. Even among scholars in the field, the best that they may have seen is a black and white copy of microfiche. Also, this other site is a good resource for the Codex Sinaiticus.

I want to thank another fellow PhD. student who pointed me to this site, Jordan Ballor, who is a PhD. candidate at Calvin Theological Seminary and a Doktorand at the University of Zurich. Thanks Jordan!

Have you ever printed copies from microfiche and been disappointed that the quality was so poor and the price was so high?

Have you ever spent 7 hours using a microfiche scanner, at the painstaking rate of 1 image every 20 seconds, to make a .pdf of a 1200 page book, grateful you weren’t spending $0.10 a page?

Surely there has to be a better way … and there is …

Being a male graduate student and thus naturally inclined toward the gadget side of life, I am always looking for some technological way to amass primary source material without spending an arm and a leg on copies, my whole Friday and Saturday in front of a microfiche reader, and the next week with a crick in my neck.

I also happen to have a low-end SLR camera for photographing old, 16th & 17th century books and via Adobe Acrobat turning them into pdfs. And Recently, I was checking out a blog on macro photography (making small objects really big). And discovered an old photography trick, if you take a standard 18-55mm “kit” lens and reverse it (with the help of a $10 reverse macro ring attachment), all of a sudden you have a very powerful zoom lens. How powerful? Well, with the requisite help of a $30 portable light box (8″x10,” AC adapter or battery powered) to back light the microfiche, you can take crisp photos of microfiche with exponentially clearer results than you can for $0.10 a page copies. And if you happen to have a copy stand or boom clamp to position your SLR digital camera, 98 images on a microfiche slide takes under 2 minutes (unless the operator is slow!). Now that 1200 page book is photographed, with 8 MP digital images, in well under an hour. And if you have a laptop, some SLR cameras allow you to take the pictures via the laptop and will route and rename the images in the destination folder of your choice.

Besides the time and money savings, there is also the portability factor - a camera, a boom clamp or tripod, a small box light, and your laptop will fit in a back pack and a laptop briefcase. Quite handy if you are headed to a library several hours away or on a different continent. And oh by the way, if you set it up right, the lens doesn’t even touch the microfiche, making even the librarians happy.

Here are some links to give you an idea of what the set up looks like:

* One other photographer’s rig (reversed lens, macro ring, and Kenko 12mm extension tube on Canon EOS 350D) 
* My example of what an reversed (18-55mm) lens can do with this slide of microfiche in a pinch (same lens by the way)
*By the way, this is one of many great shots exemplifying what this trick can do with a “normal” subject. This is what left me wondering how this could help with microfiche.