Here are a few photos of the setup, and then we'll see how it turned out. (Images all popup into another window ...)

There's the basic box; it's just a wooden frame on a plywood base, with a piece of perforated metal plate on the top. There is a small plastic tube sticking out one side, to which my vacuum cleaner attaches. (This is MARK II, and you can perhaps see that under the metal, there are a couple of wooden strips supporting the top surface. Air pressure is strong!)

For use, I wrap it in a medium-grey T-shirt, place a print on top, and fire up the vacuum cleaner. The shirt saves me the trouble of cutting a mask that matches each different print. The vacuum cleaner is plenty powerful enough to pull the print down even through the shirt. And having the shirt there (in a neutral colour) also avoids having the metal pattern show through the print (I did say this was MARK II ... :-)

The whole thing sits on the platform where I usually sit to carve or print (the camera - not visible in this photo - is clamped to a bracket on the overhang, and is pointing straight down):

In those two previous photos you can see light shining onto the setup. It's coming from across the room, where there is a battery of three small spotlights. I got these from an internet auction a couple of years ago (with this purpose in mind) and they have been quietly waiting their turn ever since:

They are actually sitting on the paper shelf I built for this year's scroll project. The lights are positioned that far away - right across the room - to ensure an even illumination across the entire surface of the paper. If the light source were too close, the top end of the print would bright, and the lower end would be visibly darker. But with lights this far away, I can't detect any difference in light levels across the image area, even with just a blank white sheet in place.

So, how did it turn out? Mixed. At first, I had the angle of the lights just too low, too raking, and the print looked like a bizarre jumble of mountains and valleys. But after raising the attack angle of the spotlights, and also adding a small 'counter-balancing' light coming from the opposite direction, at the bottom of the print, the prints look very nice indeed ... very realistic.

I say 'mixed' because although the set-up is working pretty well, it seems that my 5 MegaPixel camera, although fine for general photography, just doesn't have enough resolution to serve for high-quality offset printing (for published collections of my work). And what makes it worse is that the camera doesn't have a RAW mode for saving the data, so the images have horrible jpeg compression.

But not to be negative; this set-up will do very well for catching good images for the website, and then later, when I can arrange a higher-quality camera, it might just do the job for the publishing requirements.

Here are a couple of samples - two prints from my Surimono Albums (click to view popup versions shown at 50% of the data that my camera captures). The first one - with lots of white areas - shows the bad jpeg compression artifacts the worst, although at this 50% reduction, they are managable.

The vacuum is pulling most of the prints down very neat and flat, but this next one shows that even a strong vacuum (I cranked it right up) can't solve the problem of paper distortion when the entire sheet has been twisted out of shape by too much overprinting on thin paper. But this style of image looks much better, as the jpeg compression is less bothersome.

Take a look at the popups - they look good enough to eat! But now I'm having a few second thoughts about this; if I put photos like this on the website, and people order them based on those images, then what will they think when they open the package in a modern room full of bright fluorescent lights shining from every direction? "Eh, this looks nothing like the advertisement! I was robbed!"