SP28s are awkward as they come in lots of different shapes and sizes. Most commonly they’re somewhere between A4 and A3. Some are loose documents, some are account books in original 17th century bindings, and some are bound volumes created from loose documents in the 20th century. Setting up the document and arranging the weights usually takes longer than taking the photo. There can be up to 1,000 folios in a box, so the most I can expect to get through is one box per day.

Most cameras will not focus properly if you are closer than 3 feet from whatever you are shooting. In most cases, to fill the frame with a normal page, you need to be closer than 3 feet, so you get a blurry image. The macro function allows you to focus properly when the camera is closer to the object.

Camera shake is the other common problem. If it is dark, a camera on ‘auto’ will use a slow shutter speed, and if you can’t hold it steady, you’ll get shake. Since you really can’t use flash in archives, you need to set the camera to mimic a faster film speed - ISO 200 or even 400. The faster the speed, the faster the image gets captured and the less shake — but the image may be slightly grainier.

Most cameras allow you to zoom in on an image when you are reviewing it in the LCD screen - I use that to do a quick check to make sure my images are sharp if I’m not sure.

I can usually shoot 1000 handheld images in day - I got over 1,100 last weds between 10 and 4 in the Military Archives but those were nice A4 typescript pages which are easy to get through. Practice is the key - once you get a feel for what distance you need to be from the document to get a sharp, full frame image, and get used to judging from the preview what is sharp and what is not, you can rattle through them really quickly.

My advice is get some old essays, find a desk and spend some time messing around until you are confident you can do it right. Read the camera manual and play around with the settings until you get the right ones for your camera, and note them down!.

That’s really good news about the BL. If it applies to manuscripts it could save me a lot of trouble. Having to make an appointment sounds a bit awkward but definitely better than having to transcribe things on the spot.

I didn’t make it out to Kew when I was in London this summer, and most of the archives I visited didn’t allow photography. But the one place I did use my camera, wow — just under 1600 photos in a day and a bit! It would have taken me two weeks to go through that at my normal rate, two weeks which I then able to spend elsewhere looking at other things. Of course, the downside is that I’ve got just under 1600 photos I need to go through at some point … and yes, a few of them are blurry and probably unusable. Hopefully nothing important!

I noticed, while I was there, that the BL was running a trial with digital cameras — you could sign up, go through an induction, and then make appointments to photograph materials (not sure if it was just books or archival materials too). Hopefully they found it to be a success and introduce it more widely, as it’s a very good thing.