Camera Training

After our week at the MTC, we scooted home for one last weekend of final packing. We said our appropriate good-byes and went up to Salt Lake for some camera training. Thankfully Greg and DeeDee invited us to stay with them for the week so we didn't have such a long commute each day to the church office building. 

There was one other couple being trained with us and we had four days of learning proper techniques for photographing documents with the church cameras.

Here we at our camera stand looking like this is easy. Actually, there's nothing very difficult about it. There is a procedure. You just do the procedure and don't ask a lot of pesky questions. Just follow the procedure. It will probably all work out right. 

We spent several hours with this equipment and its attendant software, learning how to focus and adjust the lights and such things.

Since you can't really see the camera stand in the above picture, here is another one. The lights are supposed to be pointed downward 45 degrees to the platform where the documents go. The camera sits directly above at a sufficient distance to capture the whole document, but not so far away that the text becomes too small. 

The camera in this picture is a fairly pricey 16 megapixel thing with a standard Nikon 50mm lens. You don't have to remember this. There will be no test at the end.

It was kind of cool to go to the basement of the church office building where all these camera stands are manufactured and tested. If I understand correctly, there are 243 such cameras operating for FamilySearch around the world. 

And finally, in case you don't really believe we were ever in Salt Lake, here we are in front of the building. We ate lunch in the cafeteria where we expected to see all kinds of general authorities. In fact, the first day I told Sherrie, "Oh, there's Elder Ballard." She was very disappointed when she turned around and saw I was watching the TV. In some restaurants they show football games. In this one they show reruns of conference talks. Appropriate.

The week moved along rather quickly, as they tend to do these days, and we were such brilliantly fast learners that we were done on Thursday evening and had Friday to do laundry and repack everything for our flights to Santo Domingo on Saturday.