I too have had good results using a Canon PowerShot to copy documents.  Last
year my wife and I were given one day to copy several hundred letters
discovered at a country house in Albemarle County.  We were not allowed to
take them away for copying, and we didn't really want to remove them anyway,
for fear of losing something.  We set up a tripod on the front porch and
shot the documents in natural light at a furious pace.  It worked but it was
awkward -- we did not have an easel to hold the documents flat and had to
take multiple exposures of many items.  Faced with copying several hundred
more documents, many of them rather small, heavily folded, and some with
faded writing, we opted to buy a flatbed scanner.  If Mr. Fallin indeed shot
several hundred pages in half an hour with a hand-held camera, I'd call him
the Eric Clapton of archival photographers.

Henry Wiencek
Charlottesville

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