Barry J. Ewell isn't afraid to use his digital camera. He took about 24,000 digital pictures during just one family history research trip. He shared a few of his secrets for using digital technology to make family history easier.

Ewell is an expert in genealogy, particularly in Internet and field research. He was speaking at BYU's Conference on Family History and Genealogy on Wednesday, July 29.

One digital trick Ewell uses is to stay away from the photocopier. Instead, he uses his digital camera to take pictures of books, photographs and other documents. He doesn't use a flash. He'll take a book near a window, set up a small desk tripod to hold the camera steady and take photographs of page after page of a book.

To get the best results, he recommended using a camera between five and eight megapixels. Less resolution than five and the pictures won't be sharp enough. Over eight megapixels and the image size begins to be too large to handle efficiently. He also encouraged using a camera with a wide-angle lens so that close work can take in two book pages at a time.

To brighten up the photos of the pages, Ewell uses Adobe Photoshop Elements -- and inexpensive computer program that has auto correct features for dark images.

One of the things Ewell takes with him on research trips is a specially modified cookie sheet that makes it easy to take photographs of warped or curling photographs and documents. He prepared the sheet by sticking white shelf-liner paper on the sheet for a neutral background and by using magnet strips from a craft store to hold the documents in place.

Another Ewell trick is to take overlapping photographs of sections a larger document, such as a map, and then use Photoshop Elements to digitally stitch them together at home.

Ewell's use of the camera isn't limited to documents and photographs. He also uses it to take pictures of things like ancestor's headstones. He said that an overcast day is best for taking photographs of cemeteries. First he will take a general shot of the cemetery to make it easier to identify where the graves are. Then he takes a shot of the grouping of headstones in a family plot. Finally, he photographs the front, back and top of the headstone.

It also doesn't hurt to have a GPS satellite positioning unit to make a notation of the exact location of the graves. Like the photographs, such information is easily shared with other people.

Scanning is also a way to turn a document or photograph into a digital file. Ewell likes to use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to turn a document into editable text that can be imported into word processors like Microsoft Word.

If the backside of a document visually bleeds through to the other side in scanning, Ewell's trick is to put a sheet of black construction paper over the back of the paper. This effectively blocks the text from the backside of a paper and gives a cleaner scan.

"The whole idea behind digitization," Ewell said, is to make it easier to share things, preserve things and make copies of things that belong to somebody else. Knowing a few tricks makes it easier -- especially if you want to make 24,000 copies.
E-mail: mdegroote@desnews.com